FEMINIST RESEARCHFocus groups in feminist research: Power, interaction, and the co-construction of meaning
Section snippets
Focus groups: history and current status
As researchers point out, “what is known as a focus group today takes many different forms” (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990, p. 9), but centrally it involves group discussions in which participants focus collectively upon a topic selected by the researcher and presented to them in the form of a film, a collection of advertisements, or a vignette to discuss, a “game” to play, or simply a particular set of questions. The groups (rarely more than 12 people at a time, and more commonly 6 to 8) can
Feminist research ethics and focus groups: issues of power and control in qualitative research
Feminist social scientists (e.g., Finch 1984, Oakley 1981) have expressed many concerns about the ethical issues involved in one-to-one interviewing, particularly in relation to the potentially exploitative nature of the interaction in which the researcher controls the proceedings, regulates the conversation, reveals minimal personal information, and imposes her own framework of meaning upon participants (although they have also identified limits on the researcher’s power due to the constraints
Obtaining high quality, interactive data: the value of focus groups for feminist research
The relative power possessed by research participants at the data collection stage of focus groups, compared with interviews, is not simply an ethical issue. It also improves the quality of the data. As Jenny Kitzinger (1994) argues, group work ensures that priority is given to the respondents’ hierarchy of importance, their language and concepts, their frameworks for understanding the world. “In fact, listening to discussions between participants gives the researcher time to acclimatise to,
Beyond individualism: the co-construction of realities in the social context of the focus group
Underlying concerns about “bias” and “contamination” is the assumption that the individual is the appropriate unit of analysis, and that her “real” or “underlying” views (conceptualised as the views she would express “in private”) represent the “purest” form of data. For these researchers, the challenge in any kind of qualitative data collection is to overcome social desirability, self-presentation, self-deception, and, of course, the individual’s presumed reticence in talking openly about
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