Focus Group
[‘fo:kʏs ‘krup]
Research method wherein multiple participants are interviewed at the same time, encouraging conversation and influencing other participants answers.
It’s been a while since my last post, and since my adventures on reddit I have been assisting with the next step of this project: focus groups. Being able to see how these group interviews come to be and getting a peek behind the scenes is actually the primary reason why I wanted to engage with this project. Conversing with multiple people at the same time, while also collecting data, requires skills that I believe are hard to come by outside of practice-based settings. Being able to actively contribute to those interviews is important in that regard, although the quality of the conversations should be safeguarded for the sake of research.
My “paired scholar” (as the description of my program puts it) let me roam free in the margins of the earlier sessions and even lets me be the primary host of another focus group. I’m very thankful for the faith they put in me not messing up the general mood of the conversation, considering my doubts in the conclusion of my last blog post. During the sessions, if I have a feeling that there’s a deeper motivation for an answer that enriches the data collected, I can jump in and enable the participant to explain their point in a different way. While I typically struggle to formulate my sentences coherently on the first try, participants are willing to ask me a clarifying question back. Although I am clearly still learning, I am happy to conclude that whether through intrinsic motivation of the participants or my actual grasp on the method, these groups remained safe enough for participants to openly discuss their experiences.
One aspect outside of my control that influences the openness of the focus group is the primary medium used to conduct the focus groups: real-time web communication services. I am sure that the scholar will reflect on this in their own research, but I’d like to do some of that myself too. These voice calls are a godsend for this type of transnational research, since finding participants who are able and willing to travel for hours to answer some questions are few and far between. On the other hand, having such a low buy-in might also have influenced the alarming amount of people who no-showed during timeslots they confirmed to participate in. This has (so far) resulted in smaller sessions, which ultimately benefits the flow of the conversation. Online voice calls can create situations where people accidentally interrupt someone else who is just starting to speak, which is especially embarrassing when one of the people who is conducting the interview speaks over a participant (sorry 😅).
In lieu of a conclusion for this post I would like to return to the disclaimer in my first post, where I said I would be “consistently situating myself as someone with a background in the scholarship of (narrative) media.” Well, that mindset seems absent in this post. Outside of my choice of words, which sometimes references games and film, I seem to neglect my background in favour of presenting myself as a social science student. In that regard I will leave you with a promise: the upcoming post, which incidentally will be my last one, will primarily focus on transcriptions of the focus groups. Let’s analyse some text.
Ps. Yeah, that IPA in the blurb is a reconstruction of how ‘focus group’ would be pronounced with a caricatural Dutch accent.
Image credit: Poker Game, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge from 1894
