Reading :: Dialogue in Focus Groups

 Dialogue in Focus Groups: Exploring Socially Shared Knowledge

By Ivana Markova, Per Lindell, Michele Grossen, and Anne Salazar Orvig

“This book is neither a manual telling the reader what to do at various stages of work, nor is it a methodological guide answering practical questions,” the authors tell us at the beginning of Ch.2 (p.31).  By Chapter 2, I had figured this fact out — but I can understand why they had to tell us this, since the title and cover really do make it look like a textbook on focus groups. 

If it’s not a textbook or a guide, then, what is it? Drawing on dialogism, the authors argue that understanding small-group dynamics is critical to doing focus group research. This point, they say, is often lost on researchers who conduct focus groups, researchers who conceive of focus groups as a way to get answers out of collections of individuals. Rather, focus groups generate socially shared knowledge; we can focus on “the ways people generate heterogeneous meanings in the group dynamics” (p.2). 

Before getting into what that entails, let’s jump back to Chapter 1, where the authors stake out dialogism in the Bakhtinian tradition (p.8). In this tradition, the limits of the self are always in relation to the other, and understanding is always evaluative (p.8). Noting developmental psychology research that suggests that children are born with a predisposition to intersubjectivity, they relate dialogism to Lewin’s field theory, in which a group is understood as being interdependent and dynamic (p.12). 

Lewis is invoked again in Chapter 2, understood as the founder of the study of small-group dynamics (p.38). Given the fact of small-group dynamics, the authors provide “four main assumptions on which analytical tools should be based if we want them to be congruent with a dialogical approach to focus groups” (p.48):

1. “Considering focus group discussions as group discussions”: The authors recognize that focus groups create an outer framing (an orientation to some topic) and an inner framing (a context specific to the group), and the interplay between these two framings “gives way to specific communicative activity types that need to be analysed in themselves” (p.48). 

2. “Considering the subject’s heterogeneity”: They note that each individual is heterogeneous — they can have different social identities and they may speak from various positions (p.49).

3. ”Considering a focus-group discussion as circulation of ideas”: Discourse in the focus group may respond to other focus group members, but it may also respond to antecedent discourse from elsewhere. Analysts must not just account for what is said, but also how, for whom, and in what communicative activity types (p.49).

4. ”Considering a focus-group discussion as a situated activity which relies on historically and culturally shared social knowledge”: They more or less argue that we can’t understand focus-group discussion either as just here-and-now or as reflecting socially fixed preexisting positions (p.49). 

With these principles in mind, the authors go on to examine focus groups that they conducted individually or in pairs. And here, dear reader, I remembered why I don’t conduct discourse analyses. The data and analysis become very granular. So I admit that I ended up skimming most of the rest of the book. 

No matter. The first two chapters gave me a great deal to think about, both theoretically and methodologically. If you also think about focus groups, social dynamics, and dialogism, I highly recommend the book.