A methodology for the study of decision making in small groups

Policy decisions in government and non-government settings develop in committees. To understand this decision-making process, researchers of small group decision making have gone into the laboratory. Unfortunately, these researchers' methodologies have not adequately simulated committee decision making. To overcome the simulation problem, this study recorded the group discussion of a committee meeting which met October 1l, l977. The audio record of the meeting was transcribed for the group discussion analysis. Nine members discussed advising policy for a forty-five minute period. These policy statements provided the basis of this study's investigation of the small group decision-making process.

The committee spoke 263 intelligible times. The members asked questions and made personally qualified utterances (e.g., I think that . . . ) throughout the meeting. The emission of qualifying statements was found to occur independently of the questions asked during the meeting.

The chairperson, a male administrator, and the later appointed subcommittee chairperson spoke more often than any of the others. The student member of the committee was the most inquisitive. The chairperson and selected subcommittee chairperson personally qualified the most statements.

The analysis of the subcommittee chairperson appointment suggests that the chairperson selected the committee member who spoke in a manner most closely resembling his own speech patterns. Both the committee chairperson and the chosen subcommittee chairperson asked the same number of questions and personally qualified a similar (43 versus 45) number of utterances.

It is important to note that these results should not be expected to be generalizable to other committee meetings. The new methodology presented here, however, should be applicable for studying other committee meetings. The methodology presented in this paper will be useful for the collection of small group discussion data so that any small group can be more systematically examined.