Focus Groups: The Moderator’s View and theAnalyst’s View

draft chapter for Giampietro Gobo, Jay Gubrium, CliveSeale, and David Silverman (eds.) Qualitative ResearchPractice (Sage, forthcoming)

Phil Macnaghten* and Greg Myers**

As recently as ten years ago, an academic researcherhad to explain, define, and justify the seemingly oddresearch practice of getting eight or so people in a roomand making them talk for an overhearing tape recorder;now everyone, academic and non-academic alike, thinksthey know what focus groups are. Focus groups have gonefrom the specialist knowledge of market researchers and afew innovative academic researchers in such fields ascultural studies and social policy, to wide publicnotoriety, the topic of television documentaries and thebutt of comments about ‘focus group fascism’ and ‘focusgroupies’ in image-obsessed political and socialinstitutions. But focus groups have also provided datafor highly influential studies in a range of socialsciences (e. g., Morley 1980; Burgess et al. 1988a;Liebes and Katz 1990; Livingstone and Lunt 1994; Milleret al. 1998; Wodak et al. 1999).

Focus group methods have been set out in a varietyof handbooks and introductions (Krueger 1994; Morgan1988; Morgan and Krueger 1998; Wilkinson 1999; Kitzinger1995), and the classic study by the originators of themethod has been reprinted (Merton et al. 1956). Usefulshort introductions by one of the most innovative offocus group researchers are now available on the web(Kitzinger 1995). A recent collection of essays dealswith methodological and theoretical issues, andespecially, relations between the researcher and theparticipants in the groups (Barbour and Kitzinger 1999).And at last, there is a thoughtful handbook for social

2

science researchers that does more than just give rules,advice, and moral support (Bloor et al. 2001). So wewill not give yet another general introduction to how todo focus groups. Instead we would like to focus on justone group in one project, and consider two ways oflooking at it.

We are often struck when we work together (1999;Myers and Macnaghten 1998) by the productive tensionsbetween our two approaches. For Phil, who has extensiveexperience planning qualitative research projects andmoderating focus groups (Macnaghten et al. 1995; Grove-White et al. 1997; Grove-White et al. 2000), what mattersmost comes before and during the two hours spent talkingto participants. He pays close attention to the designof the groups, plan of the topic guide, recruitment ofparticipants, facilitation of discussion, and theconceptual scheme that is relevant to this project andthis audience. Greg, whose experience is as a discourseanalyst (Myers 1998; 1999; 2000; forthcoming), payscloser attention to what happens after the tape recorderis turned off and the flip chart folded up: thetranscription of the tapes, the analysis of thetranscripts, the emergence of an interpretation based onthis analysis. Of course Phil also analyzes transcriptsand Greg also plans topic guides and moderates groups,but our disciplinary hearts are at different stages ofthe process. To over-simplify somewhat, we might thinkof two tendencies:

looking ahead to the focusgroup

looking back at the focusgroup

Preparation for the groups Analysis of the transcriptsReadable transcript Detailed transcriptGeneralisation fromstatements to larger socialchanges

Understanding of why thatstatement was made there

Focus on underlyingattitudes

Focus on performedinteractions

Aims to influence policy andinform theories of social

Aims to inform methodologyand understanding of

3

change interaction

We could say that of course one should pay attentionto all stages of the research process, from topic guideto publication. But in any particular study, researchershave to make practical choices at each stage, and witheach choice they open up some possibilities and close offothers. These choices are not just practical matters;they carry implicit theoretical commitments. And in afield as diverse and innovative as focus group research,they cannot be made by reference to some generally agreedcode of good practice. We can only try to become morereflexive about the choices we have made and why we madethem in a particular study.

Planning

We will focus on the most recent of the manycommissioned research projects in which Phil has beeninvolved, a series of eight focus groups in August andOctober 2001 for the UK government Agriculture andEnvironment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC). The report,‘Animal Futures’ is currently available on the web(Macnaghten 2001), along with a number of other documentsfrom the Commission. As with any study, the backgroundan audience determined many of the choices theresearchers made. Phil and his colleagues at the Centrefor the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) had alreadydone a series of focus group studies of related issuessuch as public responses to Genetically ModifiedOrganisms (GMOs), technological risks, sustainability,recreation, and the natural environment. In the case ofGMOs, public debate has largely been confined to issuesaround GM plants, seed companies, and crop trials. Theclient for this study was the Animal Subcommittee of theAEBC, which produced a brief asking for research on howpublic attitudes and feelings around animals and animalexperiments might affect controversies around the geneticmodification of animals. With colleagues at CSEC, Philwrote a proposal responding to the brief, arguing that

4

what AEBC needed was broader research on all thedifferent ways people relate to animals, and inparticular the ways their beliefs and values aboutanimals relate to implicit beliefs about what is natural(Franklin 1999; Macnaghten and Urry 1998).

Often focus group research takes place in a contextof several layers of argument, where people haveconflicting beliefs, and where social researchers presentdifferent framings of those beliefs. In the case of the‘Animal Futures’ groups, there were already surveystudies of whether people are for or against animaltesting, and for or against GM research and products.These studies, which were summarised in a review of theliterature commissioned by the AEBC (Breakwell 2001),tended to focus on how information about the newtechnologies affected acceptance or rejection. Phil andhis colleagues proposed that the issue might not bewhether they are for or against, but the conditions ofacceptance or rejection: Do they accept animal testingif it offers help for serious medical problems? Do theyreject GM research because of lack of trust of thescientists? These conditions could depend on the ways inwhich different people relate to animals, whether walkingthe dog, watching wildlife documentaries, or raising tensof thousands of chickens. The conditions of acceptancemight not fit into the categories that policy-makersexpected (medical, ethical, commercial, technical . . .);people might draw their own lines (Kerr et al. 1998), andthey might acknowledge their own conflicting, ambivalent,argumentative views (Billig 1987). The CSEC researcherspresented focus groups as an appropriate technique toexplore such a complex terrain; as Bloor et al. haveargued, focus groups are ‘the sociological method ofchoice’ for ‘gathering data on group norms’ (Bloor et al.2001: 6).

The researchers knew from previous projects thatpeople could hold powerfully ambivalent feelings aboutsuch issues as animal experiments. The topic guide theyproposed was designed to get them to explore such

5

ambivalences instead of concealing them under yes and noanswers. Other research designs might use tasks orexercises to get people talking (Kitzinger 1990; Bloor etal. 2001). Phil’s topic guide has them talkingspecifically about their relation to animals, and moregenerally about the ways people interact with animals,before going on to three 3-foot by 4-foot boards to leadinto the biotechnology and experimentation issues. Thefirst has pictures to prompt discussion of controversiesabout treatment of animals; the second and third havestatements about the Human Genome Project and animaltesting, and about possible uses of genetic modificationof animals. It might seem that this crammed the specifictopic – animals and biotechnology – into the last thirtyminutes of a two-hour session. But the aim was to groundthese more specific issues in their everyday experienceand understanding of animals. (As it turned out, in somegroups, biotechnology was raised earlier as an example byparticipants , perhaps with reference to ‘ear mouse’,Dolly the sheep, or xenotransplantation, the developmentof animals to provide organs for humans (Brown 1999).)

Other ways of planning. Of course not all focusgroups start like this. This particular project wasframed in terms of on-going policy discussions, but otherstudies may lead to purely academic publications, or theboundary between academic and policy applications may notbe so clear. This project was conceived as a small,rather quick stand-alone focus group study; in otherlonger-term projects the focus groups might be designedto precede, complement, or follow up surveys,ethnographies, or depth interviews (Morgan 1993; Michell1999; Agar and MacDonald 1995). The close relationbetween the researchers at CSEC and the users at AEBCmeant that the project could be designed specifically toprovide input into the policy process, when it mightstill have an effect. That also meant that theresearchers knew more or less what they were looking for,which is not always the case.

6

Sampling

A quantitative researcher might think that focusgroup researchers were rather cavalier about traditionaldemographic categories. Focus group researchers do notaim for a representative sample of a population; theytry to generate talk that will extend the range of ourthinking about an issue, and to do that they recruitgroups that are defined in relation to the particularconceptual framework of the study, a ‘theoretical sample’in the terms of Glaser and Strauss (Glaser and Strauss1967; Becker 1998: see also Gobo, this volume). Forinstance, in Kitzinger’s study of AIDS awareness in theUK (Miller et al. 1998), this meant recruiting, alongwith many other groups, prison guards, intravenous drugusers, families of HIV positive people, and journalistsfrom African countries who might respond to the popularUK view of AIDS as an African disease. A study of GlobalCitizenship included both groups that might be expectedto see their lives in global terms (media professionals,business executives) and people who might be expected tosee their lives in more local terms (owners of smallshops, volunteers in local community activities)(Szerszynski et al. 2000).

In the ‘Animal Futures’ project we are discussing,this meant recruiting some groups of people who might beexpected to have views on GMO animals, such as pet ownersand farmers, but also recruiting from some groups whoserelations to animals might not be so obvious, such aspeople who hunt, shoot, or fish, or people recruitedbecause they don’t have pets. There were two groups offarm couples, one for ‘intensive farmers’, raisingthousands of pigs, or hundreds of thousands of chickens,and another for ‘extensive farmers’ raising sheep orcattle in much smaller numbers. This is an example of adistinction that might not be made in other samples, butone that might be meaningful in relation to the specifictopic under study: the researchers thought that farmerswho had daily contact with individual, recognisableanimals might have different feelings about them from

7

those farmers who dealt with animals as part of anindustrial process.

The recruiting criteria also made sure that therewould be a demographic range across the groups, so thatthere would be some groups recruited from age 25-35, andothers from ages 30-50 or 45-70, some would include bothmen and women while others would be just women, somewould be urban, some suburban, and some rural, and thatdifferent groups would draw on different socialclassifications (A-B-C1-C2-D). But there was no attemptto have one group for each of the possible combinations,as one would have one cell for each combination in aquantitative study. The aim was not to correlateopinions with these demographic categories, but just toinsure that no obvious group was left out. An additionto the original plan is an example of the kind ofthinking behind these categories. After the first sixgroups had been conducted in Lancashire, the AEBC askedfor two more groups in London, matched to two of thenorthwest groups, just to be sure that the results werenot peculiar to one region. (As it turned out, theLondon groups were not strikingly different).

Most of the participants recruited met for the firsttime when they came to the focus group; the exceptionswere the two groups of farmers – four couples in each –who were recruited through contacts so that they mightfeel more comfortable (we’ll return to one of thesegroups later). The ‘Wildlife’ group on which we willfocus in this chapter is particularly interesting,because it is fairly heterogeneous in standarddemographic terms: 4 male and 4 female, some local andsome from elsewhere, some vegetarian and some not, agesfrom 30-50, and occupations such as carer, lawyer,plumber, mother, civil servant, local government officer,and shop clerk. What they have in common is that theyare all interested in wildlife in some way, and that, aswe will see, quickly becomes a bond by which they definethemselves as a group.

8

It might seem that it would be productive – or atleast exciting – to bring together people from groupsthat would take on opposing identities: vegetarian andfactory farmer, hunt saboteur and fox hunter, pet ownersand people who complain about dog mess. Indeed, suchjuxtapositions might be the point of deliberative ofconsultative groups aimed at achieving consensus orgiving a representative voice to known positions. But aswe have noted, the aim of focus group research is usuallythe exploration of group norms. It is difficult in thebest of circumstances to get a group of strangers tobring out in talk just those assumptions and tensionsthat they usually leave implicit; when they are facedwith familiar and sharply defined positions, it becomesimpossible (Becker et al. 1995). The conventional wisdomin focus group research (and it is just conventionalwisdom) is that there have to be some common groundbetween participants for the differences betweenparticipants and tensions within one participant’s viewsto emerge.

Other ways of thinking about sampling. Currentapproaches in discourse analysis stress the ways peopleconstruct identities in interaction (ref). Focus groupresearch, as a practical matter, proposes categories,persuades the client that these are useful categories,and recruits people in those terms. In this project,some groups referred explicitly to their having anidentity; for instance, participants in the Wildlifegroup referred to the kind of person who might be in thegroup, as opposed to some imagined others. (I willdiscuss the form of transcription later in the chapter).

Phil well like if you know . it’s their territory . doyou you feel responsible for how how you are intheir territory?

M /well you have to be don’t youKath /by not treading on their nests and that sort

of /thingF /yeah yeahF yeah

9

Cameron I think that’s a personality trait I think . youknow . as as . as lovers of wildlife um . I thinkyou’re probably . not pigeon-holing because ofcourse there’s all types of wildlife lo/vers

Phil /yeahCameron but . I think you’re talking a personality trait

rather than a wildlife issuePhil yeah yeahCameron when you see . um people walking through the woods

um . slurping a McDonald’s milkshake that they’vejust driven there to-

Phil yeahF mmCameron and then throwing it away M yeah yeahCameronI don’t think you can . associate wildlife . um

uhn fauna flora with that person [laughs]several [general laughter][two turns missing]Irene they probably wouldn’t see it anywaycameron yeah it’s it’s it’s the person I think it’s the

personality traitCameron but it may be . the type of person Phil mmCameron who’s attracted towards wildlife Phil mmCameron is the sort of person . there may be some links

there . I wouldn’t be surprised put it that way(3/7)

These people define themselves as sharing an interest inwildlife, and values assumed to go with this interest.They can also refer to this group identity implicitly,for instance in a joke. In this group, the round ofintroductions was done by asking each participant to tellabout ‘a memorable animal’. After they have gone aroundonce, there is this exchange:

Phil so when when I asked you . you you’ve all comecome up with sort of wildlife examples . is thatright

10

M um

M um

Phil none of you have thought about . a cat or a dog

Cameron well I did initially yeahPhil did you?Cameron yeah . we had- I don’t want to bring the whole

tone down or anything [laughter] but uh one of oneof one of our dogs died a couple of weeks ago

Phil yeahCameron and uh clearly you know the first thing you said

went into my mind . but uh Phil yeahCameron like like the gentlemen there said uh > I should

know your name what’s your name?<Peter Peter=Cameron =Peter . as Peter said . so many . so I went for

the lion (3/4)

The laughter suggests a shared sense of what isappropriate for this group. Cameron then refers to thegroup as a group, assuming he should know the namesalready. Other groups may not find it so easy to definethemselves; for instance, ‘not having pets’ is notusually a term people use as a social category. Whatthat group noticed, and questioned, was that they wereall women; Phil had to explain that they were not justinterested in women, and other groups were mixed.

Some researchers prefer to use existing groups suchas those at a day centre for the elderly, or colleaguesat work (Holbrook and Jackson 1996; Miller et al. 1998);in the ‘Animal Futures’ study they could have gone to thelocal RSPCA, a riding club, or a fishing association.This approach makes it easier to recruit participants,makes them more relaxed, and lets the group serve as akind of check on how far someone’s statements areconsistent with what others know about them. But somemoderators feel that the familiarity may close off

11

expression of doubts or differences. And they may notarticulate the implicit values that are the point of thefocus group: participants may assume that everyone hereknows what they know. The two groups in the ‘AnimalFutures’ study in which the people knew each other wasthe intensive farmers, for which Phil had to use somecontacts and get friends of a friend. He thought thepresence of wives might make the discussions lessadversarial, and might lead the couples to talk moreabout interaction with the animals as part of their everyday routine. One of these was an odd group, as we willsee in the next section, but Phil doesn’t think that theparticipants’ knowing each other is the reason for thisoddity.

It might seem that the technique most consistentwith current thinking on identities would be to rungroups over a longer period and let the participantsdefine what the group is. This approach has worked wellfor Burgess and her colleagues (Burgess et al. 1988a;Burgess et al. 1988b). But it does not escape the firstquestion (asked or suppressed) that every participantbrings with them to a focus group: ‘Why me?’ Andwhatever the dangers for the research of a rigid schemeof categorization of identities, it is useful in planningthe groups, because it pushes researchers beyond thevoices that are most familiar, most obvious, mostarticulate, or easiest to recruit.

Facilitating

Rapley (this volume) notes that the literature oninterviewing has proposed different categories ofinterview style, reflecting different relations betweeninterviewer and interviewee. Similarly, focus groupmoderators may be more or less interventionist; theyalso may have more or less empathy with a particulargroup, may be more or less identifiable by them as one oftheirs, and may contribute more or less of their ownpersonal narratives in the discussion. These styles mayeven vary between interviewers in the same project,

12

working with the same topic guide. Phil is, by his ownadmission, a rather interventionist moderator, raisingtopics directly, calling on some participants and holdingoff others, cutting off lines of talk that seemunproductive, challenging some apparent contradictions ofvagueness. Greg is less interventionist, lettingparticipants talk on even when they wander from the topicguide. This could be the result of his being lessexperienced, or it could be a reflection of differentaims. Phil points out that the terms of reference of anacademic article are wider than those of a researchproject, so a wider range of talk is potentially usable,and discussion can wander more. Either of us can listento tapes of the other and hear missed or closed offpossibilities, Greg hearing Phil’s interruptions, andPhil hearing Greg’s failure to bring them back to thetopic.

In the ‘Wildlife’ group, the moderator intervenes byformulating

(rephrasing what participants have said in his ownwords), proposing views to get a response, selectingspeakers, and challenging them.

formulation

Kath hopefully we’re thinking more about our animalsand trying to

Phil uh huhKath deal with them in a more humane wayMichael I think it’s more tailored to man’s use . uh

what sort of mood at the timeCameron using a more efficient Kath yeah fashionableMichael really isn’t itCameron sounds cold and calculating but yeah . agreePhil so it seems there are two things going on.

There’s the kind of you know [writing on flipchart] the cold and calculating . trend yeahthat’s one trend . and then there’s anothertrend which is . we’re actually treating them

13

more humanely . would that be fair . those arethe /two kind of things

Amanda / yeah . there’s two sort of thrusts there(3/35)

proposing viewsPhil What do other people think about that? I mean, in

other words what Andrew is saying is that there’snothing wrong with this in principle, all right.It depends on the reasons you’re doing it and onthe outcomes. But other people might say no, thisis just wrong, you know, you shouldn’t be messingabout with animals in this way. Just on thispoint what do people think about that?

Kath It’s got to be really thought out what the longterm problems can be, if they can possibly workout what they could be. I’m sure they’ve got arough idea.

Phil So you’d be more in principle, you’re not sureabout this whole thing.

Kath No, not really.

speaker selection

[the conversations between Amanda and Phil, Angela andKeith, go on at the same time]Amanda I think you’re

better doingobservations onsomebody mindyou . if you’re

Keith no the spaceones arenecessary

looking at thebrain and things Isuppose it’s aseasy to examine amonkey’s brain

Angela but thosethings like the[[ xxx ]]experiment

isn’t it Keith [[ xxx ]]Phil yeah Angela in AmericaAmanda rather than a

human brainKeith Yeah but they

monitor things

14

Phil sorry I must say . would . Keith . sorry Keith,one person at a time right [laughs] . otherwise wecan’t . right . okay so when you think aboutanimals, how many animals do you think are used .let’s say in this country and what kinds?[continues] (3/39)

challenging (they are talking about a plan to geneticallymodify mosquitoes so that they can’t carry parasites)

Cameron the mosquitoes one doesn’t cause me anyproblemsPhil uh huhAmanda no that’s great thatCameron if I’m a six year old sixty no a hundred and

fifty year old man talking to my great greatgreat great great grandchildren . right >that’sa lot of breeding< [laughter] I’d say .mosquitoes I remember them, they were theselittle things were they and they used to

F mmCameron that’s one creature I wouldn’t mind going

extinctPhil why why why wouldn’t that be scary because you

were saying it’s scary messing about you don’tknow what’s gonna happen . I mean wouldn’t thatbe the same with mosquitoes?

Amanda you could save so many people from havingmalaria

Cameron on the face of itAmanda horrible . you know . you’re helping people

from suffering from diseases (3/56)

The moderator can also do any of these moves more subtly,for instance selecting a participant by angling one’sshoulders or transferring one’s gaze towards them, or bygiving them back channel responses (‘mm’, ‘uh huh’,‘right’).

15

The point of all this intervention is to keep thegroups on topic, and to push the topic beyond what hasalready been said in this and other groups. As we haveseen, Phil wanted to go beyond the already familiarstatements for or against animal research, for or againstbiotechnology, and systematically explore the underlyingconditions, for instance the relation to medicalproducts, or the deeper sense of what is natural and whatis not. He knew from earlier groups that theinstrumental uses of animals (as opposed to theiraffective roles as pets or objects of hunting or wildlifestudy) tend to be taken for granted, and people tend toclose down discussion of such issues and even close offthinking about them. So he had to get groups toacknowledge these tensions, for instance, talking aboutthe discomfort they might feel about the treatment ofanimals in producing the food that they themselves eat.Despite all this active intervention, the term that Philoften uses for moderating is empathy. He sees his aim asgetting the people to bring out what is distinctive abouttheir own view, as a group or as individuals.

In the Wildlife group, this intervention works well,in that each challenge or formulation gets a responsethat leads on to further discussion. The interventionsstand out more in a less smooth-running group, such asthe Intensive Farmers. It is apparent from thetranscript that Phil has a problem here, because theychallenge him before he even turns on the tape recorder.He then gets into trouble with an apparently innocentremark in the first round of introductions, a stage ofthe discussion in which participants are usually willingto wait to see what happens next; a participant says‘most of our neighbours now are solicitors’ and Philresponds ‘gone up market have they?’ A little later, Mikecomes back to this:

Mike Can I ask you a question before we go on?Phil Course you can, yeah.

16

Mike You said about going up market with solicitors.So where do solicitors come then, are they atthe top?

Phil quickly apologizes, explains, back-pedals, anddisclaims, but it is too late; he is in for focus grouphell, several minutes of discussion of whether (byimplication) he has a low opinion of the status offarmers. It is unusual that a participant is willing toinsist on a topic, turn after turn, so early in thegroup. And this tone continues later; whatever questionPhil asks, the question Mike wants to answer is about thestatus of farmers, the high status they deserve forrunning good businesses and feeding the country, and thelow status they have been given by the institutions thatPhil is taken to represent.

There are several possible explanations for thistrouble. Phil notes that the issues around farming wereunusually politicized at this time, the year of foot andmouth disease, with almost daily reports on the crisis inthe countryside, and firmly defined positions. There isthe way they see him: though he has said that he and hiscolleague are from the university, Mike refers to them atvarious times as representing the government departmentsthat the farmers blame for making their lives a misery.One might imagine that a closer match of moderator andparticipants would have made for easier interaction, butit is by no means the case that the best groups resultfrom such close matching, and it is not obvious whichaspects of identity (gender, age, region, socialinterests) should have priority. Phil expected that thefarmers’ groups might be more confrontational, so he tookthe unusual step of recruiting couples rather thanindividuals, hoping that the presence of husbands andwives together would lead discussion away from generalpolemical statements and towards more detailed talk aboutthe running of the farm and their relations to theanimals. He was hoping for some of the complex ‘speakingfor another’ that sometimes happens in such groups(Schiffrin 1993). This strategy seems to have worked

17

with the Extensive Farmers, but not with the IntensiveFarmers. What is surprising is that even this verydifficult group does produce useful talk, despite therepeated returns to the one theme; they do haveinteresting and not entirely predictable things to sayabout biotechnology, and Phil brings these things out andis able to use them in his report.

Another view of group interaction. As thecomparison of the Wildlife transcript and the IntensiveFarmers transcript suggests, groups develop differentdynamics even when the moderator follows the same topicguide. Participants in the Wildlife group areparticularly forward in addressing each other, ratherthan the moderator. This is a stage most groups get toat some point (Myers 2000), but this group starts in thefirst minutes. Here Cameron uses a question to Kathy toset up his own comment:

Phil do you do you feel part of it or do you feel .a bit of an outsider just sort of . glancingin?

Kath (2) no: I don’t think soPhil you feel part of it /then?Kath /yeah I think you feel part of it . I think .

you feel lucky enough to be part of their lifewhilst they’re . flying around . you know .I’ve been lucky enough to the islands inScotland and . you know . be on sort of birdreserves there

Phil yeahKath but with . with the birds just flying around

and ones that you might not normally get sortof . in Britain itself but /

Cameron /you’re definitely in their territory therearen’t you?

Kath well you are /yeah that’s rightCameron /walking through the woods almost anybody I

think you feel part of it rather than in theiror personally in their territory

Kath yeah . yes

18

Cameron there’s a differencePhil mmCameron I mean the classic answer to your question is

it depends where you are . what you’re lookingat what you’re doing (3/6)

There are long stretches when Phil does not intervenemuch, and they prompt each other:

Phil okay . this is something we touched on a littlebit . who mentioned animals and research? wasit you Cameron?

Cameron noAngela it was me I think . yeah Phil yeah . okay . is this an important issue do you

think?Irene to some people it isMichael it is for medical researchAmanda yeah I think we’ve needed it Michael rightAmanda we’ve come a long way haven’t weMichael mmPhil yeahAmanda it has to be saidCameron for some people it’s the most important issue

in their livesPhil yeahMichael without certain drugs none of us . would be

hereKath noMichael would we possibly Kath I think if . I don’t know >touchy subject isn’t

it< but if one was put in the situation whereyou had a serious illness . and the decisionwas whether to=

Michael =save the sheep or youKath well . not so much that but whether to do

testing on that . mouse or whatever in order tofurther . you know

Michael if it was my life I know which way I’d voteIrene yeah

19

Kath well I know . I would . I’m afraid . I’d wantmy life saved . which is terribly selfish but

Irene well we are selfish aren’t weM butAngela but if it works that’s it . you don’t need to

use the animals for that anymorePhil what what are the different reasons for using

animals for research? (3/37)

All this goes on without much intervention of themoderator, and without there being any pre-existing linksor strong ties of social identity; it is a group formingitself. This may make it easier to explore group norms,because they become less cautious with each other, morewilling to start on unsure ground. But it also meansthey set up their own sense of interactional norms in thecourse of the two hours. In the passage just quoted,Irene says this issue is important ‘to some people’,fencing it off as a pressure group issue. Amanda phrasesher assertion of medical progress with a tag question‘haven’t we’, and Michael does the same with ‘would we’.Cameron presents a view, not as his own, but ‘for somepeople’. Kath categorizes it as ‘a touchy subject’, akind of warning that other groups sometimes call, ‘amatter of opinion’, not something everyone is expected toagree on, and she frames this too with a tag question,‘isn’t it’. Someone finishes her sentence for her, andshe disassociates herself from the volunteeredconclusion, ‘well, not so much that, but’. Kathcharacterizes her own preference here as ‘terriblyselfish’. In every turn, they signal to each other theterms in which the discussion should take place, checkingthat others are with them, and fencing off potentialareas in which they might get bogged down. This carefulpoliteness can provide its own constraints (Kitzinger andFarquhar 1999).

Recording and transcribing

The details of making the groups available foranalysis and discussion might seem too trivial to allow

20

for much disagreement, but here too there are importantdecisions to be made that have theoretical implications.First, Phil and his colleagues chose to record the groupson audiotape, instead of using videotape, which providesmuch more data for analysis (Matoesian and Coldrenforthcoming; Bloor et al. 2001) but which can also bemore intrusive. They could also have relied on notesinstead of transcribing the interaction, but this, whilecommon in market research, in unusual in academicresearch, because it does not enable the analyst toreturn to the data and respond to challenges.

The tapes were transcribed by Kate Lamb, of CSEC,who has done many such transcripts, and has become highlyskilled at puzzling out overlapping talk and attributingturns to speakers. The conventions Kate has been askedto follow here are simple:

all words are transcribed, using conventionalspelling (not using the spelling to indicate thepronunciation in any way)

repeated words, broken off words, and back channelutterances (uh-huh, mm) are ignored

uncertain or inaudible passages are indicated there are no indications of pauses, overlaps,

stresses, volume, pace, or intonation, except inconventional punctuation

These conventions save transcription time, and make thetranscripts readable by the researchers and theirclients; the extra features possible in some othertranscription systems can make the text nearlyunreadable, and can even influence readers’ sense of thesocial status of participants (Ochs 1979; Coates andThornborrow 1999; Bucholtz 2000; O'Connell and Kowal2000).

Other views on transcription. As Guy Cook haspointed out (Cook 1995), every transcript leaves outsomething, and the choice is not between selective andunselective representations, but between selections fordifferent purposes. Phil, looking for themes, needs to

21

know what they said, so that he can choose key passages,but he can rely on his memory for some of the feeling ofthe interaction. A quantitative content analyst needsthe accurate and consistent transcription in a simple andreadable format; the transcript is then reduced to itscoded representation. A discourse analyst needs some ofthe details that indicate interaction, such as backchannel utterances, pauses, overlaps, and stresses. SoGreg goes back to the audiotape and adds these in, as hehas done for most of the passages in this chapter. Healso follows the convention of not insertingcapitalisation and full stops, because they are part of aprocess of translating the spoken words into somethingmore like a written sentence. His transcriptions arenothing like as detailed as those used by someconversation analysts (for thoughtful discussions, see(Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998; ten Have 1999)). But it isnot simply a matter of the more detail, the better;using a transcript that is more detailed than one needsis like giving a few unnecessary decimal places on one’sstatistics.

Analysing

As Celia Kitzinger (this volume) has noted inanother context, methodological handbooks give much moreattention to setting up the research than to analyzingthe results. Phil’s brief project leaves him with about200,000 words of transcript, even in this basictranscription, the length of two or three PhDdissertations. But only a few writers on focus groupssuggest what the researcher might do with the huge amountof data. And it is at this stage that Phil’s approachand Greg’s differs most sharply, Phil mapping the woodswhile Greg chops up a tree.

Phil’s analysis of the eight ‘Animal Futures’transcripts was governed by two facts: he had a briefand he had a deadline, just a few weeks after the lastfocus groups. This meant that he had to find the keypassages quickly, looking for the main themes of his

22

topic guide and his report: different capacities inwhich animals enter people’s lives, conditions foracceptance or rejection of animal testing, and relationof these conditions to new developments in biotechnology.Every time he came across a quotable theme, he marked itwith a highlighter, folded down the corner of the page,and indexed the page number on the front of thetranscript. That way, as he wrote the report, he hadeight bundles in front of him, each with a list ofpossible quotations. While this might seem ad hoc, hewas being guided, not just by his reading, but by his ownfresh memory of the 16 hours of focus groups. Out of the200,000 words of data, he chose only about 1,000 for thereport, but they corresponded to what he saw as centralthemes, repeated throughout the transcripts, a validsummary, in his view, of the transcripts as a whole. Hisanalysis was admittedly exploratory and open-ended, buthe also felt that it got at the underlying dynamics ofthese discussions, because he came to the analysis with asense of what the issues and tensions were for thesepeople, and of how the discussions, which he hadmoderated, had gone.

For the report, Phil chose quotations that made therepeated point simply, briefly, and in a striking way.He included some quotations from every group, but somegroups, such as Wildlife, were clearly richer for him.For instance, he quotes this passage (as transcribed byKate Lamb):

Phil Can I just say, so in what ways do you think theseanimals are natural?

M Well, they won’t be natural will they?Peter They’re not natural, they’re man made aren’t they.M They’re engineered.Irene But we do that now through interbreeding don’t we.M But even more so now …Phil But that’s a point, how is it different from

conventional selective breeding?Michael It’s quicker.Irene More precise. ((3/57), Macnaghten 2001: 27)

23

He parallels this with another passage from the ‘Non-animals’ group that he presents as paralleling this onein the way it illustrates ‘moral and pragmaticconsiderations’. Then he goes on to another topic. Theshort time for analysis meant that he could keep alleight groups in his mind at once, and quote a passage forcomparison from another group, while in a larger studyover a longer term he might have had to resort to codingsystems and software that would essentially do what hewas doing with his highlighter and page numbers on thecover sheet.

Other ways of analysing. Greg was not involved inthe ‘Animal Futures’ project, but if he had been, hisanalysis would have gone in a different direction. WhilePhil focuses on what was said, in relation to certainkinds of arguments about nature, animals, and humanaction, Greg looks at how it was said (Myersforthcoming). So instead of identifying repeated themes,Greg looks for patterns that can indicate what theparticipants think they are doing here, the relation ofthe moderator to the participants, and participants toeach other, to the topic, and to the conventions of thegroup. Here is the passage just quoted, as retranscribedby Greg:

Here is the same passage transcribed in more detail:

Phil can I can I just say so so in what ways do youthink these animals are are natural?

M (1) well they won’t be natural will they=Peter =they’re not natural they’re /man-made aren’t theyM /they’d be . engineeredPeter engineeredIrene but we do that now through interbreeding /don’t weM /but even more so now /there’s all the different

applicationsPhil /but that’s a point its it . how is it different

from conventional selective breeding?Irene it is /Michael /it’s quickerPhil >quicker<

24

Irene more precisePhil >more precise<

Greg might start with the one-second pause and the ‘well’in the second turn, which suggests that the speaker ispresenting his response as dispreferred, unexpected,because he is rejecting the presupposition of thequestion that these animals are natural. The tagquestion ‘will they’ has several possible functions (Westet al. 1997; Eggins and Slade 1997), but here it might beseen as eliciting agreement with this challenge to thequestion. Peter echoes M, and then M completes Peter’sstatement, and Peter echoes M again, in the pattern ofrepetition that is very common in focus groups. Thelatching of turns (Peter starting without a pause afterM’s turn) and M’s overlapping of Peter’s turn, make itinto a kind of collaborative statement. Both the nexttwo turns, Irene’s and M’s, present potentialdisagreements, and both begin ‘but’, implying a kind ofagree/disagree structure (Pomerantz 1984; ten Have 1999).Phil as moderator picks up Irene’s comment (which shemade a few minutes earlier in the focus group). WhenMichael answers, Phil echoes him quietly, as if this wereone item for a list, not the only possible answer, andIrene, using a parallel form, offers another candidateanswer, which Phil also echoes quietly. After the quotedpassage, Cameron takes this as an opening for a longerturn. These hedges (‘well’), tags (‘aren’t they’),disagreements, and repetitions give the rhythm of thisgroup in this interaction. They would help us show howthe interaction changes over the course of a group, orhow this group is different from that with the ExtensiveFarmers, or how focus groups differ from other apparentlysimilar kinds of group discussion, such as meetings ordinner table discussions (Myers forthcoming).

Interpreting

Interpretation, though it is often treated withanalysis, can be a rather different stage, one whichbegan in this case when Phil sat with his annotated

25

transcripts and asked himself, ‘So what?’ Of course theanswer to this question was implicit all along, in thetopic guide, sample, facilitation, and analysis: it wasimportant to show the range and complexity of humanexperience and awareness of animals, and to show howthese relations would make acceptance or rejection ofanimal biotechnology conditional, a complex andcontradictory issue. For Phil, interpretation is alwaysa matter of placing the particular analyzed passageswithin a framework of current theoretical concerns. Theintroduction to the passage just quoted (‘Can I just say,so in what ways . . . ) operates as an interpretationtelling readers what to make of it for the purposes ofhis argument.

. . . [P]eople also appeared to be grasping at amore fundamental difference pertaining to how we, ashumans, should be striving towards a relationship inwhich we interact with nature in a way in which weare only a part of nature, in a relationship ofrespect, and where nature can go on, more or less,regardless of our own actions. The transgression ofsuch boundaries raised both moral and pragmaticconsiderations (Macnaghten 2001: 27).

The dialogue then quoted conveys a specific example ofmoral considerations: in the passage from the Wildlifegroup, ‘they won’t be natural’ or in the passage from theNon-animals group, ‘If God or whatever meant for cows todo this in the first place it’d be like that already.’The colloquial sound and the detail given by the extendedquotations is part of what makes it effective rhetoricalsupport for these more general arguments, but once themain ideas are illustrated, the particular words can beleft out of the summaries and bullet points of thereport. For Phil, focus groups are microcosms that canstand for wider discussions, real or potential, just asthese participants can stand for wider groups.

Other interpretations. For Greg, on the other hand,a focus group transcript is a way of recovering, as faras is now possible, a moment to moment situation, and the

26

shifting relations of people in that situation. It canlead beyond this particular group and moment, but only bycomparison with interactions in which similar featuresoccur, the way that people disagree in meetings, or raisenew topics at a family dinner, or use reported speech instories. In the passage just quoted, such an analysismight lead to an understanding of how this group workstogether to bound acceptable opinion, and how theyrespond differently to the moderator and to otherparticipants. It would be about how they do a focusgroup, and thus would lead to a more specific account ofhow focus groups are different from other kinds of talk,and how this group is different from others, and thisstage different from earlier and later. Greg’s responseto the question ‘So what?’ does not link this talk toattitudes about animals, but to the ways people set up inconversation the possibility of opinions, claims tospecial knowledge, and ways of dealing with disagreementand still continuing to talk. Focus groups are possiblebecause they are highly constrained occasions (theyinvolve going to an unfamiliar place, at the same time asothers, with no aim of one’s own, and being led through adiscussion on topics one does not usually talk about by astranger). But they are persuasive because they are seento be slices of modified ordinary conversation. One taskof interpretation is to trace that modification, whilealso accounting for that sense of ordinariness.

Applying

Most social research is about the past; most focusgroups are about anticipation, trying to find out whatpeople might do or would say. That is why they are fullof hypotheticals and simulations. The researchers areinterested in anticipation because someone wants to knowhow to deal with the projected future. The ‘AnimalFutures’ project would be a success for Phil and hiscolleagues only if it makes points briefly andforcefully, and in terms of the on-going debates, so thatit can make some mark on the report and recommendationsof the AEBC.

27

As we have seen, the detail of the focus group goesthrough several reductions before it even reaches theclient; Phil interprets and comments on the quotations,then summarizes the interpretations in lists of bulletpoints in the introduction to the report. His report isthen further interpreted, reduced, and cited in the AEBCreport Animals and Biotechnology. Here, for example, isone of the bullet points in the section on ‘PublicAttitudes’ that is traceable to the passage of his reportthat we have just discussed:

most people do not rule out the genetic modificationof animals but do see the technique as somethingnew. The pace of change to animal species affordedby modern biotechnology techniques, the degree ofintervention, and precision involved and theanticipated likelihood of unanticipated mistakes areconcerns (AEBC 2002: p. 16)

This clearly does relate to the focus group data:Michael saying ‘it’s quicker’ and Irene saying ‘it’s moreprecise’. But of course a bullet point loses Phil’s morecomplex argument about the tensions in the passage, aswell as Greg’s points about the particular occasion thatled to these statements. The opinions are presented asgeneral statements, as if they were results of a survey,not of focus groups. Any policy-oriented researcheraccepts that their work will be reduced in form when itreaches policy makers. Phil commented on a draft of thisreport, and raised issues about how particular pointswere presented, trying to get in more of hisinterpretations. The immediate impact of the researchdepends on this one text; his full report is availableon the web page, but it is the commission report, or theexecutive summary of the commission report, that policy-makers would see. Phil wanted to see that the summary,and the summary of the summary, came as close as possibleto his longer report.

But this report would not be the only output of theresearch. Phil is also writing an academic paper basedon the focus groups; there the textual impact is likely

28

to be broader but more diffuse. There the frame wouldnot be immediate policy decisions, but arguments aboutthe role of the public in decisions about technologies ofgenetic modification, and about the uses of focus groupsas public deliberation. It could be cited by othersinterested in his particular turn on sociologies ofnature, or his analysis of one or more of the groups, orhis methodology; it might fit in a reference withphilosophical articles or large-scale surveys. Academicfocus group studies vary in the amount of space they giveto quotations from the data; in some they just providebrief, striking illustrations of the theoreticalargument, while in others the main issue is the kind ofinteraction going on in a group. But in either case, theclaim to have something new to say relies at least inpart on the sense of authenticity conveyed by thecolloquial words on the page, and their contrast with theregister of the academic argument going on around them.

Looking ahead and looking back

It might seem that we have a simple contrast; Philis a believer in focus groups, extending them to newareas, and Greg is a skeptic, undermining their authorityby putting the words back in their situation. But itmight be more helpful to see them as representing twoperspectives on the focus group process. Phil looksahead, emphasizing the design, starting with a cleartheoretical framework, defining the groups, drafting thetopic guide, and facilitating the groups so that heelicits the kinds of discussion that he can use fairlydirectly in his report. Greg looks back, starting withthe analysis of participants’ interaction moment tomoment, going back to the transcription and tape, andfrom there to the conditions established by the focusgroup design. For Phil, the strength of focus groupresearch is that it can get at people’s attitudes in alltheir complexity. For Greg the strength is that focusgroups allow us to account for the situation – theinteraction of researcher and participants, the treatmentof topics in conversation, the conventions of various

29

forms of group discussions – in a way that other methods,such as surveys or ethnographies, do not.

Each of us can give a devastating critique of theother. In Phil’s view, Greg is drawn deeper and deeperinto details that, however interesting in themselves,lead away from the overview of issues and attitudes thatis, after all, the output of the research. In Greg’sview, Phil sometimes takes passages from the transcriptwithout being able to give an account of why theparticipants said just that just then, or of why Philchose this bit and not that. Despite these differencesin perspective, we manage to collaborate on occasion,because there is a range of phenomena that lie towardsthe middle of this continuum between seeing the forestand seeing the trees. Phil’s theoretical orientation toargument, ambivalence, and contradiction directs Greg’sattention to ways in which the participants deal withproblematic opinions. Greg’s emphasis on rhetoricalcommonplaces in structuring a conversation directs Phil’sattention to the form of the repeated, central statementsthat interest him. Researchers can and do start ateither end, with the exploration of complex opinions, orwith the odd, hybrid conversational activities thatprovide the conditions for expressions of opinion in agroup. Both kinds of analysis are possible because thedata of focus groups are extraordinarily rich.

9973 words (including references)

30

References