CJCheck Stage 1: development and testing of a checklist for reporting community juries – Delphi process and analysis of studies published in 1996–2015

Background: Opportunities for community members to actively participate in policy development is increasing. Community/Citizen’s Juries (CJs) are a deliberative democratic process aimed to illicit informed community perspectives on difficult topics. But how comprehensive these processes are reported in peer-reviewed literature is unknown. Adequate reporting of methodology enables others to judge process quality, compare outcomes, facilitate critical reflection, and potentially repeat a process. We aimed to identify important elements for reporting CJs and develop an initial checklist, and to review published health and health policy CJs to examine reporting standards.

Design: Using literature and expertise from CJ researchers and policy-advisors, a list of important CJ reporting items was suggested and further refined. We then reviewed published CJs within the health literature and used the checklist to assess the comprehensiveness of reporting.

Results: CJCheck was developed and examined reporting of CJ planning, juror information, procedures and scheduling. We screened 1711 studies and extracted data from 38. No studies fully reported the checklist items. The item most consistently reported was juror numbers (92%, 35/38) while least reported was availability of expert presentations (5%, 2/38). Recruitment strategies were described in 66% of studies (25/38) however, the frequency and timing of deliberations was inadequately described (29%, 11/38).

Conclusions: Currently CJ publications in health and health policy literature are inadequately reported, hampering their use in policy-making. We propose broadening the CJCheck by creating a reporting standards template in collaboration with international CJ researchers, policy-advisors and consumer representatives to ensure standardised, systematic and transparent reporting.