Groups provide several benefits over individuals for judgment and decision making, but they suffer from problems too. Structured-group techniques, like Delphi, use strictly controlled information exchange between individuals to retain positive aspects of group interaction, while ameliorating negative. These methods regularly use ‘nominal’ groups that interact in a remote, distributed, and often anonymous manner, thus lending themselves to internet applications, with a consequent recent increase in popularity. However, evidence for the utility of the techniques is scant, major reasons for which being difficulties maintaining experimental control and logistical problems in recruiting sufficient empirical ‘groups’ to produce statistically meaningful results. As a solution, we present the Simulated Group Response Paradigm, where individual responses are first elicited in a pre-study – or created by the experimenter – then subsequently fed back to highly-controlled simulated groups. This paradigm facilitates investigation of factors leading to virtuous opinion change in groups, and subsequent development of structured-group techniques.
PurposeThe Children’s Health in Care in Scotland Cohorts were set up to provide first population-wide evidence on the health outcomes of care experienced children (CEC) compared with children in the general population (CGP). To date, there are no data on how objective health outcomes, mortality and pregnancies for CEC are different from CGP in Scotland.ParticipantsThe CEC cohort includes school-aged children who were on the 2009/2010 Scottish Government’s Children Looked After Statistics (CLAS) return and on the 2009 Pupil Census (PC). The children in the general population cohort includes those who were on the 2009 PC and not on any of the CLAS returns between 1 April 2007 and 31 July 2016.Findings to dateData on a variety of health outcomes, including mortality, prescriptions, hospitalisations, pregnancies, and Accident & Emergency attendances, were obtained for the period 1 August 2009 to 31 July 2016 for both cohorts. Data on socioeconomic status (SES) for both cohorts were available from the Birth Registrations and a small area deprivation measure was available from the PC. CEC have, on average, lower SES at birth and live in areas of higher deprivation compared with CGP. A higher proportion of CEC have recorded events across all health data sets, and they experienced higher average rates of mortality, prescriptions and hospitalisations during the study period. The reasons for contacting health services vary between cohorts.Future plansAge-standardised rates for the two cohorts by sex and area deprivation will be calculated to provide evidence on population-wide prevalence of main causes of death, reasons for hospitalisation and types of prescription. Event history analysis will be used on matched cohorts to investigate the impact of placement histories and socioeconomic factors on health.
An experimental study to explore the effect of Delphi group size and opinion diversity on participants' experience of the process, as measured by their perceived cognitive load and their self-reported satisfaction with the process.
Although the individual has been the focus of most research into judgment and decision-making (JDM), important decisions in the real world are often made collectively rather than individually, a tendency that has increased in recent times with the opportunities for easy information exchange through the Internet. From this perspective, JDM research that factors in this social context has increased generalizability and mundane realism relative to that which ignores it. We delineate a problem-space for research within which we locate protocols that are used to study or support collective JDM, identify a common research question posed by all of these protocols—‘What are the factors leading to opinion change for the better (‘virtuous opinion change’) in individual JDM agents?’—and propose a modeling approach and research paradigm using structured groups (i.e., groups with some constraints on their interaction), for answering this question. This paradigm, based on that used in studies of judge-adviser systems, avoids the need for real interacting groups and their attendant logistical problems, lack of power, and poor experimental control. We report an experiment using our paradigm on the effects of group size and opinion diversity on judgmental forecasting performance to illustrate our approach. The study found a U-shaped effect of group size on the probability of opinion change, but no effect on the amount of virtuous opinion change. Implications of our approach for development of more externally valid empirical studies and theories of JDM, and for the design of structured-group techniques to support collective JDM, are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.