Focus Group Practice

Claudia Puchta, Jonathan Potter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761966913, 9780761966906
• eBook ISBN: 9781446234907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Focus Group Practice is unique in providing a picture of focus group moderation and interaction that is based on the study of what actually happens in high-class market research focus groups and in using recent theories of interaction, for example discourse and conversation analyses, to throw light on the practice of moderation. It is written in clear, engaging and non-technical manner and richly illustrated by examples from focus groups in a wide range of different contexts. New moderators will find the basic elements of focus groups described and explained, and experienced moderators will find new ways of understanding what they do which will help them to develop their skills.

Focus Groups moderation is understood in terms of the cutting edge theories of interaction. It concentrates on the basic and subtle processes through which moderators elicit opinions, manage disagreements, and generate a range of views. How are participants encouraged to be animated and involved, and how are the arguments and anecdotes discouraged? How are responses guided to in the required direction? This book addresses these pertinent questions.

Above all, how does a moderator keep participants focused?

This unique book will be essential reading for all involved in focus group practice. It is accessible to broad readership, including undergraduate students.

1 Focus Groups and Interaction

The aim of the book

Our aim is to offer a clearer understanding of the practice of focus group moderation. We hope to make more visible what moderators and focus group participants actually do in focus groups. As the reader works through the book we hope they will gain a progressively deeper feel for the intricate way that moderators’ activities link in with participants’ activities. There is what we would like to call an interactional choreography at work. Good moderators can smoothly perform the steps of this choreography without thinking. Those new to moderation know just how easy it is to tread on the toes of their participants, and just how elusive a really smooth flow of interaction can be. Our hope is that the book will contribute to this skill; it will offer a few dancing lessons, it will show how some of the moves of good dancers are put together, and it will provide some of the resources needed to build new dances.

These features of the book should also appeal to different readers. On the one hand, focus group moderators and market researchers will appreciate practical guidance; on the other, those academics, who are interested in focus groups as a research instrument or in talk per se will appreciate the explication of how groups are managed. In addition, it will contribute to a growing literature that takes research methods as a topic for study in its own right.

How to read this book

This book offers a new approach. Focus group interaction has been neglected for a long time. Although it is widely accepted that the use of focus groups is a research technique that collects data through group interaction (see for example Morgan, 1997), only a small number of focus group researchers recognize this interaction as a resource in data analysis.

The primary emphasis of this book will be on what conversation analysts call talk-in-interaction. They describe talk in this way as they wish to highlight what people actually do with talk rather than the sorts of abstractions about grammar or semantics studied by linguists. For much of the twentieth century an abstract linguistic approach dominated research, and one might have been forgiven for thinking that talk was the second class citizen of the social science world; something rather rough and ready when compared with the elegance and purity of perfectly formed grammatical sentences. It is only recently that researchers have started to look at what happens when people talk to one another, when they chat or gossip, when they flirt or complain. The beautiful thing here is that what seemed rough and ready turns out to be intricately organized in a way that enables people to get things done. Talk-in-interaction is quite different from talk in the grammar book or talk in the philosophy text; it is bound up with people’s lives – their projects, their developing identities, their evaluations.

The success of recent work on talk has come from abandoning many past theoretical assumptions and stipulations about language and instead looking carefully at what is going on. Ironically, the most powerful tradition of research on language in the last 30 years (associated with the linguist Noam Chomsky) virtually ruled out the study of actual talk, on the grounds that it would be too messy to make sense of! The success of work in conversation analysis and discursive psychology has arisen from ignoring such stipulations and going out into the field with tape recorders and video cameras.

We have followed through this approach with the topic of focus groups. Rather than work with theoretical stipulations about what goes on in groups, or with moderators’ post hoc reports of what went on, we looked at what is actually said in them. This means that our conclusions will be of a different order to what is found in previous books on moderation. We will develop our understanding of what moderators do without pigeonholing them with general labels such as the seeker of wisdom, the enlightened novice or the therapist. We will also attempt to keep our descriptions of what people do relatively concrete and close to the practices in the groups; we will avoid abstract descriptions of idealized moderator behaviour invoked with terms such as communication skills, interest in people and openness to new ideas. We all know that these qualities are helpful (imagine a moderator who used their poor communication skills to show their lack of interest in people and their resistance to new ideas!). The hard thing is to specify what such qualities amount to in practice.

In addition to these descriptions and suggestions about focus group moderation the book will offer a broader level of help. We believe that it will be useful to focus group moderators to have a general understanding of how interaction works, and in particular how conversation works. Again, we expect that moderators will have great practical skills as talkers – most of us have. But we would like to develop a more explicit and strategic understanding of conversation. To support this we have chosen to break up the text with a serious of boxes that introduce key features of conversation. These inform the observations about focus groups, but they will also provide a general feel for interaction and its features.

These boxes provide another way of reading this book. It can be read as in introduction to interaction using what goes on in focus groups as a major illustration. The boxes can be read without reference to their surroundings – at times they are linked to specific features of focus groups discussed in the text; at times they have only a general relevance. Sometimes they provide a slightly different take on material in the main text. At other times they highlight an important concept or finding from the study of interaction.

This book will be helpful to focus group moderators and social scientists in three specific ways.

• First, it will make specific observations about focus group interaction and how it can be managed.
• Second, it will provide a generic understanding of how interaction works which may help interpret events in groups and suggest new practical exercises for the participants.
• Third, it will be useful for social scientists interested in understanding social science methods and the integration of discursive psychology and conversation analysis.

Transcript and talk in the world

One of the features of this book is that we will work with extracts from actual focus groups run by a range of market researchers involved with big name brands. This is real interaction – not something made up and cleaned up to illustrate how things ought to work, and not something put together from memory and in line with theories and expectations. However, the use of such transcripts presents a dilemma. They are likely to seem unfamiliar at first, cluttered with symbols indicating features of speech delivery and intonation.

We have thought long and hard about cleaning them up by taking material out and thereby simplifying what is shown. But to do this would have been counter to the central theme of the book, which is that the practice of moderation is delivered in the specifics of what is said, and that such specifics are delicately organized. A wealth of research on conversation leads to the inexorable conclusion that no detail of interaction can be safely dismissed as insignificant. No facet of speech, whether it is a pause, a repair, a change in pitch or volume, the selection of particular words, the point at which one speaker overlaps another, or even a sniff, should be assumed to be irrelevant to interaction. This is one of the reasons why it is hard to provide general rules for what moderators should do. The specifics often override the apparent generalities.

Transcribed talk looks messy, probably much messier than we might expect having grown up with a diet of play scripts, newspaper summaries of conversations, and the kind of idealized representations that are common in instruction books for all sorts of activities, including manuals for running focus groups. But that is what real talk is like. Speakers hesitate, pause, repeat themselves and correct themselves. They can respond to hesitations that are too small to measure with a stopwatch, and capture nuances of intonation that suggest trouble or confusion. As everyday speakers we have enormous practical skills – after all we have spent much of our life practising talking, which is more time than with virtually any other deliberate human activity. It would be surprising if we could not breeze an A = in our advanced speaking exams every time! Yet when it comes to characterizing this complexity we are not nearly as skilled. When we try and describe it or explain it we struggle. These are not things we have to do very often in everyday settings that are overwhelmingly practical rather than theoretical.

We hope that readers will quickly get used to reading the transcript that appears in the following chapters, and thereby develop a feel for the way it captures the spoken quality of interaction over and above the words used. The transcript will help make moderation practices explicit, and start to indicate features of interaction that can be drawn on to make moderation more effective. The transcription system used here was developed by Gail Jefferson over the course of a range of studies starting in the 1960s. It has been tried and tested in conversation analysis and discursive psychology, and has been found to capture much of what is significant in interaction – we will introduce it with an example later in the chapter, and it is reproduced in full in an appendix.

A short history of the focus group

David Morgan (1998) describes the history of the focus group as falling into three periods:

• early work carried out by both academic and applied social scientists;
• market research carried out in the period between the Second World War and about 1980;
• recent research in both academic, market research and political settings where they have been conducted in many different fields.

Social science origins

Merton is considered to be the father of the focus group, and the first example of focus group research is Paul Lazarsfeld’s and Robert Merton’s work at Columbia University in 1941, when they tested people’s reactions to wartime radio broadcasts. After the war, Merton and two of his students, Patricia Kendall and Marjorie Fiske, wrote an influential book on focus groups that has since been reprinted several times (Merton et al., 1990 [1956]).

Focus groups as an isolated market research method

Between 1950 and 1980 focus groups were rare outside the field of market research. Merton and Lazarsfeld were themselves increasingly drawn to survey-research and away from the focus group, though a direct connection between market research and focus groups was established as Lazarsfeld often used marketing projects in order to finance his academic research. However, the move to marketing was also driven by the uses that market researchers themselves created for focus groups. They frequently referred to focus groups as group depth interviews (Goldman et al., 1987). The depth in this alternative title marks the involvement of psychoanalytic theory in understanding what is going on, and particularly the hidden, unconscious motives lying behind the consumption of different products.

During this period neither psychology departments nor business schools offered any instruction in the techniques of running and analysing focus groups. Morgan (1998: 40) notes that since few market researchers published descriptions of their focus group technique they failed to have the influence they might have on the development of new procedures and uses for focus groups.

Focus groups as a widespread research method

According to Morgan (1998: 40) applied social research was the vehicle that spread focus groups beyond the world of product marketing. In 1981 Evelyn Folch-Lyon and her colleagues published articles on their efforts to promote the use of contraceptives in Mexico (see for example Folch-Lyon et al., 1981). They used focus groups and surveys to explore knowledge, attitudes and practices concerning contraception among different social groupings in the Mexican population. Another early piece of applied research project was run by Dayle Joseph and colleagues (1984). They constructed a questionnaire that surveyed, with the help of focus groups, the reactions of gay and bisexual men regarding the emerging AIDS epidemic.

Since then focus groups have become increasingly popular as a tool in applied social research, especially in the field of health (see Wilkinson,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Focus Groups and Interaction
• 2 Producing Informality
• 3 Producing Participation
• 4 Producing Opinions
• 5 Producing Useful Opinions
• 6 Producing Varied Opinions
• 7 From Practice to Strategy
• Appendix: Transcription symbols used in this book
• References
• Index