Citizen Engagement in Practice - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 54

to collect and process citizen input in such a context. Specifically, the
study aimed to find out:
• how citizens assessed the degree to which they have choice or can influ-
ence future directions in medical drug research;
• citizens' attitudes to drug research and development;
• how citizens would choose to influence decision-making on future drug
research and development.
The study used the Delphi method, an iterative series of questionnaires,
to reach a conclusion. A 'snowball' process was used to reach potential res-
pondents. All people with the last name Andersen, and also all females
with the first name Mette in the Danish email catalogue from www.jubii.dk,
were contacted by email to ask for their participation in answering an initial
questionnaire. These initial contacts were also asked to forward the email to
families and friends to request their participation. As a result, 417 people
were sent a second questionnaire and 377 replies were received, giving a
response rate of 90.4%. The data were collected by email during January-
February 1999, and were processed online by Infopoll in Canada.
The results showed that citizens wanted more autonomy and influence
in making decisions about their own health, and that they perceived that
the power of health professionals, e.g. GPs, to make decisions on their
behalf was declining. Respondents also wanted more involvement from
patient organisations, representative citizen groups and ethics committees
as a part of the decision-making process concerning future drug research
and development.
The researchers concluded that the demographics of the respondents
generally matched Danish demographics, although the number of respon-
dents aged 18-50 was higher than for Danish society as a whole. They ob-
tained an unexpectedly high response rate from women, unskilled workers
and people aged 50-59. However because the survey was undertaken by
email, the researchers cautioned that the results could not be extrapolated
with confidence to the population as a whole (Moldrup et al. 2000).
4.3.4 The National Forum on Health - Canada
This case describes a major national consultation on healthcare policy and
provision in Canada. It was highly participative in nature and involved one
thousand three hundred Canadians selected to be broadly representative of
the diversity of Canada's size, demographics, economic activities and eth-
nicity. Thirty-four different communities took part. The consultation