week 10 - focus groups

Workshop Week 10

Part 2: Exploring focus groups in more depth

Imagine you’re designing a research project to explore what people consider to be pro-
environmental behaviours and what might impede or encourage these. Remember, focus
groups are not like conducting interviews with many people, but are about promoting
interaction and collaborative responses.

Activity 1: Designing effective focus groups (20 minutes)

In small groups work through the following questions and prompts:
Practicalities
1. Who might you invite to take part in the focus group and why?

people w/o imbalance of power

shared common ground views to allow them to talk honestly about their views

diverse range of views to encourage healthy debate
2. Think about potential challenges or difficulties in running a focus group on this topic
and come up with a list of ground rules for participants.

dominant ppts - deal with it by having a mediator/having everyone write down contribution prompts

logistics - getting enough people to a place at the same time w/o scheduling conflicts

get people to come up with their own ground rules so they feel in control/in charge
Prompts
3. What might you use to prompt discussions in the focus group? Try to think beyond a
list of questions and consider other things to use – e.g. pictures, statistics,
statements, open-ended scenarios, infographics, newspaper articles. Create 4-6
prompts aimed at exploring attitudes towards eco-friendly practices that you think
will encourage participants to share and discuss their thoughts, feelings and
behaviours.

presenting articles/statistics

asking opinion on recent events

give a topic/niche and see where it goes

Activity 3: Methodological reflexivity (10 mins)
Think about some other ways of collecting qualitative data that were discussed in the
lecture. What differences in the data collected for this research question might there be for
each method? What impact might this have on the overall findings?
- Interviews

logistically more difficult

people are more honest when they don’t feel judged
- Open-ended questionnaires

risk of not getting enough info

- Story-completion
- Diaries
- Naturalistic data (e.g. from internet chat rooms)