Abstract
Citizens’ juries provide deliberative fora within which members of the public can debate complex policy issues. In this article, we reflect on our experience of undertaking three citizens’ juries addressing health inequalities, to explore the positive and facilitative role that humor can play within group-based research focusing on sensitive health policy issues. We demonstrate how both participants and researchers engaged in the production of humor in ways which troubled prevailing power dynamics and facilitated positive relationships. We conclude by recommending that researchers, particularly health policy researchers and those pursuing the kind of lengthy group-based fora associated with deliberative research, consider the positive role humor can play when engaged reflexively. In so doing, we make a major contribution to extant literature on both deliberative fora (which is yet to consider humor’s facilitative capacities) and the role of humor in qualitative (health) research (which rarely explores researcher complicity in humor production).
Highlights
In July 2016, we undertook three citizen juries to explore how a diverse range of lay participants perceived health inequalities
We posit that humor may be a powerful tool for qualitative health policy research, insofar as it enables participants to aptly navigate the relationships, power asymmetries, and substantive topics often explored within this domain
We primarily focus on the negotiation of power through humor as a dynamic arising within the research process, though we occasionally seek to highlight how inextricably linked aspects of researcher and participant positionality more broadly came to bear on localized practices of power
Summary
In July 2016, we undertook three citizen juries (in Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool) to explore how a diverse range of lay participants perceived health inequalities. For the purposes of this article, citizens’ juries are group-based research encounters, during which members of the public consider evidence regarding politically salient problems and deliberate over possible policy responses In utilizing this methodology, our primary intent was to explore substantive questions regarding public understandings of long-standing health asymmetries and potential policy responses. We posit that humor may be a powerful tool for qualitative health policy research, insofar as it enables participants to aptly navigate the relationships, power asymmetries, and substantive topics often explored within this domain. Whether humor realizes this potential, we suggest, depends on its reflexive and critical deployment, as well as the social capacities of participants
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