The steps in a Rich Dialog Process March 23, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Rich Dialog Process (RDP) , trackbackI’m blogging this week on a Rich Dialog Process (RDP) which I facilitated last week regarding better ways of getting research (including evaluation) implemented in the policy arena. The process consisted of three meetings – a policy-makers only meeting; a researchers-only meeting; and, a joint policy-makers / researchers meeting. More description of the process follows:
1. A research project had been undertaken researchers from SHORE for BRCSS – Carroll, Blewden and Witten (2008) – looking at the link between social science research and policy development. It looked at case studies of welfare reform, housing insulation and immigration policy development and the role of social science research in these.
2. Usually research such as this is published on a web-site or in an academic journal and there may be one or more hour long presentations of the research to various stakeholders groups. These presentations often consist of most of the time being taken up by the presentation of the findings and then a few questions asked by the participants and then everyone goes on their way. The concept of the Rich Dialog Process (RDP) is to provide more chance for deliberation than that which normally happens with research of this type. The RDP also allows for deliberation from different perspectives. So in this case two groups were set up. The first group was a group of researchers and the second group a group of policy-makers. It was relatively easy to get a group of interested senior researchers. It was more difficult to get high-level policy-making stakeholders as they tended to delegate attendance much lower down within their organizations.
3. Two separate meetings were held with these groups. These meetings consisted of a brief five minute presentation about what the RDP process consists of. (That presentation will be put up on the RDP site in due course, along with more detailed information on running an RDP like this). Then there was a 3/4 hour presentation by the researchers of their findings. This was followed by a discussion for the rest of the session where the group deliberated about what they saw as the key issues in regard to the topic. This resulted in a statement from the group. In the case of the policy-makers group, this statement was structured under the following headings: “We, as policy-makers, need to:”; “Researchers need to:”; and, “Together, policy-makers and researchers need to:”. These were set out as a list of bullet points under each heading. These notes were then circulated to the researchers’ group in preparation for their meeting. At their meeting the researchers then came up with another list of points structured in a similar way (although being researchers the list was about three times as long as the policy-makers list!). This list, in turn, was circulated out to the policy-makers group in preparation for the final joint session.
4. The last dialog session (the third and final session in the RDP) consisted of a joint meeting between the researchers and the policy-makers. A summary set of possible questions had been prepared for the group to try to structure the discussion a little as it was a large group (about 35). This summary list of questions was put to the group at the start of the final RDP and the group decided to discuss several points from it, but not to go through the whole list. The final RDP group then discussed the issues and came up with a final summary set of points.
More on the process tomorrow.
Paul Duignan, PhD.
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