Measuring the outcome of consumer participation

This paper reports on the development of a methodology to measure the outcome of consumer participation through content analysis of consumer advisory board minutes, the consolidation of observations so derived into generic categories, and the weighting of generic categories by expert judges. The weights are then applied to the observations of a particular board generating three distinct outcome measures. The methodology was developed as an alternative approach to case studies of consumer participation that appear in the literature and as an attempt to give the phenomena some empirical shape and structure.