Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
95 participants, 76 completed all questions in the survey (N = 35 from co-
hort 0, N = 41 from cohort 1). Survey results can be found online [
3
]; results
for two of the five scenarios are reproduced in Appendix
2
.
9.3.1 Aggregated Results
The survey produced clear qualitative outputs. While participants could
choose from an often rich menu of reasons to support their decisions, their
votes aggregate to a set of social decisions on the “Yes,” “Neutral,” and “No”
options. Figure
9.2
summarizes these results.
This level of aggregation allows us to characterize the answers to various
questions in different ways. First, in questions 2A, 2B, 2C, 3A, and 4B the
“Yes” answer is a clear majority choice. In contrast to these clear decisions,
while question 1C has a bare majority “Yes,” nearly as many voted “No”
and no one voted “Neutral.” We can characterize 1C as the most contro-
versial question. In contrast, question 4C has a similar “Yes” vote but with
far fewer “No” votes. Questions 1A, 1B, 2D, 2E, and 4A all had a plural-
ity of “Neutral” votes, and question 3B was almost evenly divided between
“Neutral” and “No” votes. Question 5 was also quite controversial. Both
Questions 1A and 5, two of the most most controversial questions, are pre-
sented in full in Appendix
2
.
These rough characterizations based on aggregative votes should be qual-
ified in two ways. First, they can be refined by considering the additional
information provided by the reasons participants voted for. For example,
some “Neutral” reasons protest the formulation of the question. Second, while
we can characterize these distributions of answers as social decisions in the
clearest cases (like the majority “Yes” and “No” cases noted) this is less
clear in the plurality cases. Announcing a decision rule in advance would
strengthen these characterizations and move our device from survey to social
decision procedure.
Evaluation Scenario:
This scenario focused on obligations between a uni-
versity and a student with a disability. Most survey participants stated that
they would require additional information to determine the appropriate level
of accommodation a university should provide to a student with a disability
(1A, 1B). While most survey participants agreed that an occupational ther-
apist should not consider cost to the university in deciding what assistive
device the student needs, some survey participants disagreed (1C). However,
despite disagreement, the most popular “Yes” and “No” responses both held
in common that the occupational therapist's primary obligation is to the
student.
Sensing Scenario:
Survey participants most clearly agreed that in group
homes, surveillance of residents always requires their approval (2A), and that
