Abstract
Deliberations are discussions about what an institution, community, or nation should do, and are essential for maintaining a robust democracy. This study examined whether Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) can complement existing methods for assessing deliberations, none of which fully account for the dynamic interplay among specific speech acts and speakers that unfolds over the course of a conversation. In this pilot study, students at two universities deliberated about the same issue online. ENA models of discussions at each university with the content of speech acts as nodes showed differences between discussions at the two universities that were consistent with a qualitative analysis of the transcripts, but also revealed patterns that were not initially apparent in the qualitative account. This suggests that ENA is a valuable tool for modeling deliberations.
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Notes
- 1.
It is also possible, of course, to interpret the up-down axis; however, we are not making use of that information in this analysis. Because of the dimension reduction technique used, differences between the two groups are projected to the first axis of the metric space, as we will show below.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (DRL-1661036, DRL-1713110, DRL-2100320), the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The opinions, findings, and conclusions do not reflect the views of the funding agencies, cooperating institutions, or other individuals.
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Levine, P., Eagan, B., Shaffer, D.W. (2022). Deliberation as an Epistemic Network: A Method for Analyzing Discussion. In: Wasson, B., Zörgő, S. (eds) Advances in Quantitative Ethnography. ICQE 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1522. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93859-8_2
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