Conducting Focus Groups for Business and Management Students

Caroline J. Oates, Panayiota J. Alevizou

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781473948228
  9781473948211
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526416124
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Conducting Focus Groups, Caroline J. Oates and Panayiota J. Alevizou explain what is involved in conducting focus groups, outlining their main features, use in research, their design and the kind of rich, qualitative data they facilitate.

Ideal for Business and Management students reading for a Master's degree, each book in the series may also serve as reference books for doctoral students and faculty members interested in the method.

Part of SAGE's Mastering Business Research Methods, conceived and edited by Bill Lee, Mark N. K. Saunders and Vadake K. Narayanan and designed to support researchers by providing in-depth and practical guidance on using a chosen method of data collection or analysis.

1 Introduction

Introduction

Focus groups can be defined as ‘group discussions organised to explore a specific set of issues’ with ‘the explicit use of the group interaction as research data’ (Kitzinger, 1994: 103). Put more simply, they are sites of ‘collective conversations’ (Liamputtong, 2011). The focus group is a much-used technique in business and management research as it has the potential to produce rich, in-depth insights into a phenomenon and has a degree of flexibility in how it is structured for different research purposes. The focus group is more than a group interview (a term with which it is often used interchangeably; see below) and different to the notion of an individual interview, although there are some similarities. Focus groups can stand alone in a research project, or they can be combined with other methods, but they are almost always used to generate qualitative rather than quantitative data. A key element of the focus group in whatever research context it might be used, is the facilitation of interaction between participants. This feature sets the focus group apart from similar methods and makes it both extremely attractive as a means of gathering data, and at the same time rather challenging for someone conducting a focus group for the first time.

In this book, we aim to provide an accessible guide for the reader who wants to conduct focus groups as part of a business or management research project. While the book is written with masters-level students in mind, it is also likely to be useful for more experienced researchers who are undertaking their first focus group. In this introductory chapter, we place the focus group in its historical context, explaining how it emerged in the 20th century and how it has developed since then in the business and management disciplines. We look at some examples of how focus groups have been used in this academic context; introduce the kinds of data that might be generated by focus groups; and then outline the remaining five chapters of this book.

History of the Focus Group

It is widely accepted that focus groups have been used by market researchers since the 1920s (Basch, 1987) and that early use of group interviews has been documented in social science research from around the same time. Even so, focus groups were traditionally viewed as more of a practitioner technique than one suitable for academic purposes. Focus groups gradually came to be incorporated more in academic research from the 1940s, when Merton used what he called ‘focused interviews’ in the context of investigating persuasive communications in the US during the Second World War (Merton et al., 1956). The existing quantitative research approach involved groups of participants simply and individually recording their positive/negative reactions to material. Merton developed this into an increasingly nuanced set of procedures which allowed group participants to express their subjective reactions (Bloor et al., 2001). These procedures formed the basis of early academic writings on focus groups by Merton and his colleagues (Merton et al., 1956) and remain at the core of focus group research as we know it today.

Focus groups tended to remain largely in the marketing and public relations spheres, and even now many people automatically associate focus groups with this kind of marketing research, for example bringing consumers together to discuss a new product launch, or to comment on a current advertising campaign. Such focus groups in this commercial context are usually organised by market research agencies, which have many resources at their disposal that include incentives to offer participants, purpose-built locations, sophisticated recording equipment and so on. These applications are intended to produce data that would not be appropriate for more academic research. These practitioner focus groups can be characterised by their standardised format with specific questions generated by the client and posed by a professional moderator who conducts the group. The moderator leads the discussion, maintaining the conversation and gathering responses from all the participants. Hence, there is likely to be more interaction between the moderator and the participants than between the participants themselves. This approach is completely acceptable in a commercial context, and fulfils its purpose. For academic research the expectation would be for the moderator to encourage and facilitate interaction between the participants, rather than between her/himself and the participants, often with the intention of investigating meanings and interpretations. Here, the moderation is likely to be performed by the researcher him/herself, rather than using a professional moderator. As we show in Chapter 2, focus groups can be organised in a number of ways according to purpose, so there is scope for various degrees of structure. In this book we discuss the different formats of focus groups as appropriate to an academic research project. We also explain the moderator role in further detail in Chapter 4.

Although focus groups are often associated with marketing research, they have actually been adopted in most research fields. Stewart and Shamdasani (2015) identify the many disciplines that have embraced focus groups over the decades, and we include the ones that are relevant to the topic of this book: organisation behaviour, information systems, communications, management, and marketing. In some areas of management, focus groups have not been used so widely, for example in logistics, but there is a call for more use of this method in what has been a traditionally quantitative field of research (Rodrigues et al., 2010). Today, focus groups are used extensively in social sciences research: a brief search of the first issue of 2016 of Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal demonstrates that out of six research papers that were published, two were based on using focus groups. These include a study by Knittel et al. (2016) into brand avoidance by Generation Y consumers, which takes a multi-methods approach, combining focus groups with individual interviews. We look at this study in more detail in Chapter 5. The second article is by Gadalla et al. (2016) and is concerned with a new area of focus group research, that of avatars in the virtual environment of Second Life. Here, the relative merits of traditional face-to-face focus groups, online focus groups, and those based on avatars, are compared and contrasted.

Differences Between Focus Groups and Group Interviews

The terms ‘focus group’ and ‘group interview’ are sometimes used interchangeably to mean the same technique. It is useful to consider what makes the two different, as on the surface they do seem very similar. See Table 1.1.

Table 1.1

These distinctions are not always clear cut but focus groups will often be part of a qualitative research design, where the aim is to study how people collectively understand and make sense of phenomena. A further comparison can be made between focus groups that are created specifically for research purposes, and groups that occur naturally. This is particularly pertinent in organisation studies, where it is possible to design research which can use either method. Steyaert and Bouwen (2004) recount how they used both methods in a study of innovation in SMEs. They offer a useful example which directly compares the two methods which they term group interview (i.e. a specifically created focus group) and project group (i.e. a group that already exists as part of the organisational environment). These ‘created’ and ‘natural’ group forms can be distinguished in terms of research goal, methodological focus, data generation and analysis, and the roles of the group and the researcher. For example, the researcher in a created focus group context acts as a moderator, which means they facilitate the group discussion. In a natural group setting, they would be more like an observing participant. Steyaert and Bouwen (2004) stress that the distinction between these two kinds of groups is not discrete, and should be viewed on a continuum according to the influence of the researcher on the group situation.

Types of Data Collected

So far, we have emphasised the potential of focus groups to provide qualitative data although we have also noted that in some situations they might be used to generate a more structured response which could lend itself to quantitative analysis. For example, it would be possible to ask group participants to record their reactions to a proposed new kerbside recycling scheme using a 1–5 Likert scale for measures including convenience, transparency, propensity to recycle and so on. This approach would produce quantifiable data (i.e. data that is collected in numerical form) with potential for statistical analysis. It would conform to the underlying philosophical assumptions of positivism, with the aim of collecting objective data in a replicable study. The interaction between participants would be minimal in such a research design, making it more like a group interview than a focus group, although there would be an opportunity for more qualitative techniques to be used as well, depending on the question that the researcher is attempting to answer.

However, for the purpose of a masters-level research project, consideration of focus groups would more likely be rooted in a desire for rich, in-depth qualitative data. By this, we mean data that is not viewed in numerical terms, but is consistent with meanings, interpretations, how participants make sense of things and how they articulate this to the other participants. In other words, why they think as they do. Focus groups, when moderated sensitively and with skill, excel at producing this kind of data. With a fairly open protocol or discussion guide/agenda (list of themes/key words/overall questions/activities) a moderator can present the topic to be discussed with the necessary flexibility and agility to pursue unexpected avenues of thought, or to pick up emerging themes as they develop during the group session. Merton et al. (1956) called this ‘range’, by which they meant the extent of relevant data provided by the focus group, including aspects which were not anticipated. These aspects can, if considered important and relevant to the topic, be incorporated in the protocol for the next focus group. In this way, each focus group might add something different to the previous one, even though the central topic is the same. We illustrate the notion of range in Box 1.1.

Box 1.1 Range in focus group research

As part of a wider research project on the consumption of popular culture in the UK, Oates (2000) decided to take a qualitative approach to investigate how readers of best-selling women’s magazines consumed these particular titles. Previous research had established that readers used the magazines as sources of entertainment and information, but this practical use did not explain the loyalty and affection in which the magazines were held. Oates used her personal networks to arrange focus groups with a range of readers in different settings, such as financial institutions, libraries and churches, with the aim of investigating whether the social context of consumption (i.e. the environment in which the magazines were acquired, read, and shared) could be relevant to the magazines’ success. Themes that began to emerge from the initial data collection and analysis suggested the magazines were central to notions of family and friendship networks, integral to building and maintaining relationships between women. This insight allowed the research to move into an unexpectedly rich and related area – that of gift giving. Thus, the extent or range of data produced a hitherto unanticipated direction to the project.

The example in Box 1.1 illustrates the value of carrying out data collection and data analysis concurrently, rather than gathering all the data at once, and then beginning the process of analysis. Reflecting on each focus group as it happens offers the space to incorporate new insights into subsequent groups. Another example of how using focus groups can move research into related but unexpected discoveries comes from an international project on labelling, and is presented in Box 1.2.

Box 1.2 Range in focus group research in an international context

Alevizou et al. (2015) investigated the process of encoding and decoding eco-labels on a range of household products such as food and cosmetics. Their aim was to understand how consumers interpret the many varieties of label. Carrying out initial focus groups in Greece and the UK, two European countries with very different experiences of sustainability, they started with a basic protocol which involved showing examples of on-pack labels to shoppers to gather impressions about the labels, and what meanings they had for shoppers. This approach produced much confusion in the focus groups, as participants did not recognise or understand what the labels were intended to signify. What began to emerge was the importance of different kinds of knowledge that participants drew upon to make sense of their (in)comprehension, and it was this diversion into multiple levels of knowledge that became part of the data collection. It became clear that the focus of the research inquiry should progress from looking at recognition and decoding, to probing sources of knowledge. Thus, Alevizou et al. (2015) developed the protocol for subsequent focus groups to include questions designed to elicit information about which knowledge base the participants were using to make sense of the many labels.

The potential for flexibility in focus groups is one of their advantages, as we have illustrated with these two examples from our own research. To be confident enough to work with such a degree of flexibility demands practice, but as shown above, it can lead to (sometimes unanticipated) rich sets of qualitative data. For example, Ahrens (2004) recounts how he was able to carry out research in a bank, investigating integrated performance measurement, including two group interviews which, although not labelled as focus groups, demonstrated characteristics typical of this method. The first interview he admitted was ‘boring’ yet it led to unexpected insights into the management accounting department of the bank. The second one led to an opportunity to shadow one of the managers for three days.

The Role of the Focus Group in Different Research Designs

In Chapter 2, we look at the various purposes that focus groups can be used for according to the research approach taken, which is underpinned by considerations of ontology and epistemology. Before that, we finish this chapter by discussing how focus groups can be part of a research design in three different ways – as a stand-alone method; as part of a multi-methods design with additional qualitative methods; and in combination with quantitative methods in a mixed methods design. Which design is chosen will depend on the research question to be answered. We illustrate each design with an example of a typical masters research project from business and management studies, starting with Box 1.3 where we provide an example of using focus groups as the only method in a masters dissertation. The choice to collect all your data from focus groups only would need to be carefully considered, but it is perfectly possible to generate a set of appropriately in-depth data to answer a research question in this way.

Box 1.3 Using focus groups as a stand-alone method design

Zaiqing is studying for a masters in Consumer Behaviour. She is very interested in the roles of trust and emotion in consumer decision making and has decided to rese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction to the Mastering Business Research Methods Series
• About the Series Editors
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Understanding Focus Groups
• 3 Basic Components of Focus Groups
• 4 Conducting Focus Groups
• 5 Examples of Focus Groups
• 6 Conclusions
• References
• Index