Excerpts from Research on ‘Narrative and Deliberation in Small Group Forums’

“From my data, it is clear that strong facilitators tend to short-circuit the storytelling process. The moderator of Groups 4 and 5 (who happens to be the same person) is this kind of facilitator. From beginning to end, she controls the flow of the groups’ conversation. She moves the discussion along by asking questions like, “What bothers you about that?” and, “What is your reaction to that?” She asks participants to respond to her own personal stories and to data mentioned in the guidebook. She summarizes comments: “The comments have reflected so far that we do have this technology, that … it’s confounding. …” When facilitated in this manner, small group forums tend to have a rapid-fire, scattershot quality. Participants tend to say less, to tell fewer stories, and to talk more directly to the facilitator. This makes for a fast pace to the discussions. More people talk over shorter periods of time, and there is less of the thinking-out-loud that characterizes other groups. In short, in the presence of such facilitators, participants themselves tell very few stories.

“Why do strong facilitators have this effect on forum discussions? Because, I think, this kind of facilitation assumes much of the hard work of deliberation. When participants respond directly to facilitator statements, they feel less need to connect themselves personally to issues, to make claims about the issues, to manage their interactions with others, to establish their competence to speak on the issue, or even to make their utterances relevant to the conversation. It is not surprising, for instance, that in forums moderated by strong facilitators, participants utter more non sequiturs or that they make side jokes to one another in hushed voices. Facilitators in such forums take responsibility for linking statements to one another and for developing coherent lines of argument. This gives participants less rhetorical work to do. The result: participants withdraw from the work of mounting the many barriers to deliberation.

“Given this impact, should we prefer weak to strong facilitators? Recall that weak facilitators tend to become invisible during a group’s discussion. Since they rarely interject themselves into conversations, participants tend to make longer statements, to do more thinking out loud, to respond to one another’s utterances, and generally to develop a richer narrative texture to their talk. One finds much more storytelling in these groups. All things being equal, this is preferable to the comparably thinner interactions of strongly facilitated forums. However, things are rarely equal in forums. In fact, although weak facilitators allow for a richer narrative texture of talk, they also run a significant danger, namely that participants will gravitate toward a single narrative and spend much of their time congratulating themselves on its discovery.

“The tendency of groups to end in this result has been confirmed by broader literature on small group conversations. In both experimental studies of small group decision-making and natural observations of jury deliberations, researchers have found that small groups prefer to cooperate rather than conflict, to share common rather than conflicting knowledge, to gravitate quickly to shared information, and to discover initial points of agreement and select information on the basis of that consensus (cf. Davis, Kameda, Parks, Stasson, & Zimmerman, 1989; Gigone & Hastie, 1993, 1997; Kameda, 1991; Kerr & Kaufman-Gilliland, 1994; Nemeth & Rogers, 1996; Schulz-Hardt, Frey, Luthgens, & Moscovici, 2000; Winquist & Larson, 1998). In short, the literature suggests that, left to their own devices, small groups will tend to adopt a consensus perspective, even at the cost of producing biased judgments or decisions. In the abstract, this preference seems irrational. After all, the rationale for preferring group to individual decision-making is precisely that it allows for a greater range of information and points of view to be aired. In other words, better judgments ought to emanate from group thinking. It appears, however, that social dynamics within group communication may prevent this promise from being realized. It is not clear then, that weak facilitation necessarily results in better deliberation than strong facilitation. Indeed, to the extent that we view homogeneous, biased judgments as a danger, it may produce worse outcomes than if participants had independently weighed the issue.

Reference:

Narrative and Deliberation in Small Group Forums, David M. Ryfe, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Volume 34, Issue 1 February 2006 , pages 72 – 93

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