A 4-Site Public Deliberation Project on the Acceptability of Youth Self-Consent in Biomedical HIV Prevention Trials: Assessment of Facilitator Fidelity to Key Principles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Public deliberation is an approach used to engage persons with diverse perspectives in discussions and decision-making about issues affecting the public that are controversial or value laden. Because experts have identified the need to evaluate facilitator performance, our research team developed a framework to assess the fidelity of facilitator remarks to key principles of public deliberation. OBJECTIVE: This report describes how the framework was used to assess facilitator fidelity in a 4-site public deliberation project on the acceptability of minor self-consent in biomedical HIV prevention research. METHODS: A total of 88 individuals participated in 4 deliberation sessions held in 4 cities throughout the United States. The sessions, facilitated by 18 team members, were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Facilitator remarks were highlighted, and predetermined coding rules were used to code the remarks to 1 of 6 principles of quality deliberations. A variety of display tables were used to organize the codes and calculate the number of facilitator remarks that were consistent or inconsistent with each principle during each session across all sites. A content analysis was conducted on the remarks to describe how facilitator remarks aligned or failed to align with each principle. RESULTS: In total, 735 remarks were coded to one of the principles; 516 (70.2%) were coded as consistent with a principle, and 219 (29.8%) were coded as inconsistent. A total of 185 remarks were coded to the principle of equal participation (n=138, 74.6% as consistent; n=185, 25.4% as inconsistent), 158 were coded to expression of diverse opinions (n=110, 69.6% as consistent; n=48, 30.4% as inconsistent), 27 were coded to respect for others (n=27, 100% as consistent), 24 were coded to adoption of a societal perspective (n=11, 46% as consistent; n=13, 54% as inconsistent), 99 were coded to reasoned justification of ideas (n=81, 82% as consistent; n=18, 18% as inconsistent), and 242 were coded to compromise or movement toward consensus (n=149, 61.6% as consistent; n=93, 38.4% as inconsistent). Therefore, the counts provided affirmation that most of the facilitator remarks were aligned with the principles of deliberation, suggesting good facilitator fidelity. By considering how the remarks aligned or failed to align with the principles, areas where facilitator fidelity can be strengthened were identified. The results indicated that facilitators should focus more on encouraging quieter members to participate, refraining from expressing personal opinions, promoting the adoption of a societal perspective and reasoned justification of opinions, and inviting deliberants to articulate their areas of common ground. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide an example of how a framework for assessing facilitator fidelity was used in a 4-site deliberation project. The framework will be refined to better address issues related to balancing personal and public perspectives, managing plurality, and mitigating social inequalities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.299 | 0.291 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".