<b>Examining the Form, Function, and Force of Small Stories in Informal Online Deliberation</b>

<p dir="ltr">This project examines the form, function, and persuasive force of “small stories”—short, fleeting, co-constructed narratives—in informal online deliberation. Drawing on data from the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, a community devoted to good-faith deliberation, I employ a mixed-methods design in two stages. First, an exploratory qualitative analysis identifies the story types and functions that characterize the majority of persuasive conversations, demonstrating how small stories fluidly reframe arguments, invite perspective-taking, and establish credibility in an anonymous forum. Second, a large-scale computational study leverages a fine-tuned RoBERTa classifier to find the small stories within 209,544 deliberative conversations in r/ChangeMyView, using these insights to test the relationship between storied discourse and persuasive outcomes. Controlling for the length of comments, the presence of any small story increased the odds of changing the person’s view by 28%, a trend mirrored for hypothetical (24%) and personal (29%) small stories. While these results must be interpreted with caution due to moderate model reliability metrics, they demonstrate that adopting a narrative frame measurably enhances deliberative success in a venue where persuasion is rare. This dissertation advances theorizing vis-à-vis small stories and deliberative democracy studies, offering evidence that storytelling remains a meaningful mechanism for bridging ideological divides in the digital public sphere.</p>