REPRESENTATIVENESS OF RANDOMLY SELECTED PARTICIPANTS IN A CITIZEN PANEL CONFERENCE

Abstract

We conducted a citizen panel conference, as a part of hybrid participatory conference "Forum for creating environmentally sound material-cycle society by citizen participation". We mailed invitation of the conference to random sampled 2000 Nagoya citizens over 20 years old from electoral register, and decided participants among those who stated their willingness of participation to the conference. We chose random sampling method as selection of participants to assume equal chance of participation, one of the procedural fairness of participation. In the citizen participation model, representativeness of participants often becomes an issue, in particular, when there are not many participants. We studied whether the participants of this conference who selected by the procedure based random sampling had some biased or not compared to the population.