Speaker: Dr. Yukiko Asada, Dalhousie University
Public engagement efforts in health policy have posed many value-laden questions, yet those that appreciate the complexity and diversity of the concept of health equity are rare. The Fairness Dialogues is a theoretically-grounded method for deliberating equity issues among lay persons developed in Nova Scotia. In a Fairness Dialogues session, six to eight participants communicate and are encouraged to provide reasons in an inclusive manner. The group dialogue evolves around the fictional town of Troutville, a typical mid-sized town in Nova Scotia, where the participants are asked to imagine they and their family live. The Troutville scenario presents carefully-designed, simple, open-ended cases focusing on a chosen equity issue. This presentation explains the theoretical underpinning of the Fairness Dialogues and presents its empirical illustration and qualitative assessment, which showed a promise of the Fairness Dialogues in exploring societal values with lay persons and developing their capacity to discuss value-laden questions in a reflective and inclusive manner.
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Dr. Yukiko Asada is Professor with the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Health, Aging & Society at McMaster University in the 2021-22 academic year. She obtained a PhD in Population Health from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research program articulates concepts of health inequity, advances the measurement of health inequity, and promotes public dialogues on health inequity, using an interdisciplinary approach integrating ethics, quantitative methods, and policy. Dr. Asada’s work aims to make implicit assumptions explicit in research and policy efforts to foster health equity.