Carlin to evaluate DebateWatch ’96 with Ford Foundation funding

Diana Carlin, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, has studied U.S. presidential campaign debates for a number of years.  Her work led her to believe that the debates could be a prime source of information that citizens could use to make voting decisions in the national campaign.  She conducted a series of focus groups in 1992 to see how citizens might best use the debates, and she published the report of that work in a book titled, The 1992 Presidential Debates in Focus (Praeger, 1994).  One of the recommendations of the focus groups was that the debates would make more sense to citizens if they could gather with others and discuss them.

Working with the Commission on Presidential Debates, the sponsoring organization, Carlin created a program called DebateWatch.  The concept behind DebateWatch was simple: gather a group of people to watch one of the debates together and to discuss it afterward.  Carlin created  a packet of material to guide DebateWatch groups, and the Commission expects to distribute tens of thousands of the packets through groups that emphasize voter education.

The Ford Foundation recently decided to back the project with a $200,000 grant to complete an evaluation of DebateWatch.  After a pilot study using focus groups in primary states Carlin plans to work through SCA to locate 50-75 members to organize DebateWatch groups.  Carlin and her assistants will also organize a DebateWatch group at each debate site.

From these groups a set of focus group participants will be selected.  A total of 12 focus groups will be conducted after the election in sites around the country. At these focus groups, the researchers will gather information about the insights the participants gained about the debates that they would not have otherwise gotten from merely watching them, how the participants used the information they gained from the groups in making their voting decisions, and how effective was the DebateWatch process.  An Internet discussion of the debates will also be organized by Mark Kuhn, University of New Hampshire, and the content of that discussion will be compared to that of the focus groups.