Abstract

One important critique of deliberative democracy and the practice of public forum is the extent to which controversial, moral, or symbolic issues can be well deliberated through oral discussion. This study attempted to apply multiple methods to study the dynamics of discussion about determining the name of Taiwan. Six young adults, selected from a telephone survey, were invited to attend a forum to discuss a series of political issues, including this most sensitive and controversial issues in Taiwan. The choices of each participant (preferring a new name for Republic of China or continuing to use the old one) in the telephone survey and the group discussion were recorded. Three participants who changed their choices during the deliberation process were interviewed.

Highlights

  • One important critique of deliberative democracy and the practice of public forum is the extent to which controversial, moral, or symbolic issues can be well deliberated through oral discussion

  • If this logic is correct, the current distribution of Taiwan national identification will be very similar to that of their party preferences, that is, a certain percentage of people are very clear concerning their own national identification while at the same time, there are still many others who are not sure about which party to support and who are ambivalent about national identification. This issue of the fluidity of national identification is of both empirical and theoretical importance. This issue of ambivalent national identification is associated with partisan conflicts, confrontational movements caused by partisan conflicts, and other aspects of negative impacts on the political stability and the policy consistency of the nation

  • 2.2 Phase 2: Discussion of the focus group. Interviewees who changed their choices in the inserted two questions were contacted two weeks after the telephone survey. Those who were willing to and able to participate in a focus group discussion were filtered out and invited to the campus

Read more

Summary

A Mix-Method Pilot Study of Taiwanese Young Adults

The Chinese version of this article was presented in Taiwanese Political Science Association (TPSA) at National Chi-Nan University, Taiwan, Nov. 22-23, 2008. The research is financed by the Deliberative Democracy Project at National Sun Yat-Sen University. The author thanks the Survey Research Center of National Sun Yat-Sen University for the assistance in data collection, Chi-Cheng Huang, Kurt Monroe, Chi-Jun Hsu and Chi-Ru Lin for their assistance in focus group interviews, Adam McIver for editing advices, and Su-Fen Cheng and Chi-Chie Chou for their comments and advices

Research design
Phase 1
No comments
Discussion of the focus group
Phase 3
The summary of focus group discussion
Conclusion and discussion
Ms Tseng 45 Graduate Yunlin degree
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call