philosophical, methodological and disciplinary traditions.
Key points
You can be selective in drawing from the various focus group ‘traditions’ on offer.
Choices depend on the purpose of your research, available funding and the time available to carry out the research.
You should critically evaluate available advice in the context of your own research.
Hybrid approaches can work – provided that they fit with the aims of your study.
Further reading
The following works will extend the first introduction to focus groups given in this chapter:
Bloor, M., Frankland, J., Thomas, M. and Robson, K. (2001) Focus Groups in Social Research. London: Sage.
Kitzinger, J. and Barbour, R.S. (1999) ‘Introduction: the challenge and promise of focus groups’, in R.S. Barbour and J. Kitzinger (eds), Developing Focus Group Research: Politics, Theory and Practice. London: Sage, pp. 1–20.
Macnaghten, P. and Myers, G. (2004) ‘Focus groups’, in C. Seale, G. Gobo, J.F. Gubrium and D. Silverman (eds), Qualitative Research Practice. London: Sage, pp. 65–79.
Chapter Two Focus groups in practice
Contents
Assets of focus groups 17
Limitations of focus groups 19
Claims and challenges in focus 23
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should:
have an appreciation of the particular advantages of focus groups;
be equipped to take a critical look at claims made about focus groups;
be able to distinguish between shortcomings and potential resources; and
have an idea of appropriate and inappropriate usages of focus groups.
In order to take a measured look at the opportunities and potential pitfalls involved in employing focus groups it is useful to re-visit past and ongoing debates relating to the capacity of focus groups and the challenges that their usage presents for the researcher – whether novice or, indeed, more experienced. This is the subject of the first section of this chapter.
Regardless of the specific approach taken, there are particular properties of focus groups that make them especially attractive to researchers seeking to widen engagement, both in terms of the participants that they can access, and the topics that they can address. This chapter highlights those assets of focus groups that render them an effective tool for researchers from particular disciplines, or professions. It also considers aspects of focus groups that make them amenable to addressing certain sorts of questions.
The main attributes of focus groups are then presented, including their potential for accessing the ‘hard-to-reach’ and the vulnerable; their suitability for addressing ‘difficult’ or ‘sensitive’ topics; and their capacity to capture responses to rapidly evolving situations. Examples are provided of some such applications across a range of research fields.
Next this chapter highlights some potential problems that can arise, including the limits of descriptive research and some of the issues raised by social marketing approaches (which frequently capitalize on the potential afforded by focus groups – most commonly to extend the reach of health promotion messages to include the ‘hard-to-reach’ or recalcitrant). This raises some difficult questions and the benefits of the insights provided by the community development model are once again emphasized to suggest how this issue might be more adequately addressed. While focus groups may allow for a rapid response in terms of researcher involvement as events unfold there are also dangers associated with the opportunistic use of focus groups (particularly when employed by researchers with little previous experience of this method). The – often overlooked – role of the researcher’s predispositions and interests in determining the way in which focus groups are used is also touched upon here. Some of the difficulties experienced by researchers are a result of misconceptions (including, as we have already, seen unreasonable expectations), which can lead to inappropriate usages of focus groups (such as eliciting ‘narratives’, measuring ‘attitudes’, or providing an easy, ‘quick and dirty’, route to data). With regard to the latter approach, the problems arising from a lack of attention to research design are emphasized.
Assets of focus groups
Accessing the ‘hard-to-reach’
Largely because of their perceived informality, focus groups have earned a reputation in terms of their capacity to engage with those who may otherwise slip through the net of surveys, or studies that rely on recruiting those who are in contact with services. They have regularly been the method of choice for researchers attempting to access groups viewed as ‘hard to reach’, such as members of ethnic minority groups (Chiu and Knight, 1999), migrants (Ruppenthal et al., 2005), or street-living youth (Ferguson and Islam, 2008). Some groups, of course, may be marginalized in respect of several of their attributes, such as the drug-using gay men living in an environment characterized by high rates of HIV infections studied by Kurtz (2005) or children with visual impairments (Khadka et al., 2012). Focus groups can encourage greater candour (Krueger, 1994) and give participants permission to talk about issues not usually raised, especially if groups have been convened to reflect some common attribute or experience that sets them apart from others, thus providing ‘security in numbers’ (Kitzinger and Barbour, 1999). More recently, online focus groups have been employed in order to extend the reach of research to include constituencies such as young adults with potentially stigmatizing skin conditions (Fox et al., 2007), children and adolescents born with only one arm (de Jong et al., 2012), and gay and bisexual adolescents (Ybarra et al., 2014). (Online focus groups are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4 on research design.) Focus groups – whether face-to-face or online – may allow the researcher to engage with respondents who are otherwise reluctant to elaborate on their perspectives and experiences.
Engaging with the ‘vulnerable’
This includes potential participants who are rendered especially vulnerable, as a result of particular experiences or attributes, many of whom might also be considered hard-to-reach using more conventional methods, such as surveys or interviews. Focus group researchers have had considerable success in engaging with, for example, people with learning difficulties (Kaehne and O’Connell, 2010); children with cerebral palsy, spina bifida or cystic fibrosis (Nicholas et al., 2010); individuals who have attempted suicide (Ghio et al., 2011); or those with severe mental illness (Whitley and Campbell, 2014). (Some of the issues involved in dealing sensitively and responsibly with participants who fall into these categories are considered in more detail in Chapter 7.) Broadening research engagement to include groups likely to have been marginalized, or even simply largely ignored, due to the acknowledged challenges of recruitment and sampling, is sometimes viewed as being inherently empowering, since it can
