Interviews & Focus Groups: Definition

• Types of intensive, qualitative research which generate data through directed, social interaction
  • interviews involve questioning an individual or group with expertise or experience regarding your subject
  • focus groups involve fostering discussion among groups of people with expertise or experience regarding your subject

Interviews & Focus Groups: Uses

• Research intangibles
• Intangibles = beliefs, values, attitudes, articles of faith, motives, desires ot passions  a.k.a. personal & cultural traits
• In-depth study of particular individual or group
  • sample popular opinion with interviews
  • sample popular opinion with Focus groups
• major assumption:
  • individual or group is representative of entire population
  • intangible qualities of individual or group are representative of entire population
  • knowing something about individual or group tells us something about entire population

Interviews & Focus Groups: Advantages

• interview and Focus groups (primary data)
  • Focus Groups vs. Interviews
    • Cost -less expensive
    • Reliability – Interpersonal vs. group communication
  • Focus Groups vs. Survey/Observation
    • Faster -fixed, brief time-span
    • Cost – Little if no time spent on the field
    • Access – Easier to recruit volunteers
• interviews and Focus Groups
  • Lack historical perspective, “snapshot”

1. Define the research problem
2. Review the literature
3. Select research method
4. Design your research program

Treatment of human subjects

• ethical considerations
  • do not place your participants at any risk
• propriety and modesty
  • treat your participants with dignity and respect

Sample Strategy

• Participants must be able to answer your research question for representative sample, you must know entire population
• Set sample guidelines in relation to your analytical categories (e.g. if religious faith is a category, ensure all faiths represented)
• Each analytical category requires its own stratum
• Once they strategy set, recruit participation until each quota is filled result will be a “stratified” random sample

Sample Size

• Size of focus groups
  • 6-10 people is the optimum number
• Number of focus groups
  • any number of distinct focus groups is possible
  • simple exploration / test question = 1-3 groups
  • main research methods > 3 groups
  • considerations: size of entire population
  • number of analytical categories

Setting

• Location of interview or focus group can affect quality of data collected

Establish an interpretice context

• specific sources and location used
• mode of interpretation
  • as always, justify your research decisions

Draft an Interview Guide

• Interview Guide- Pre-determined list of issues and questions to be addressed during interview (resembles coding schedule for content analysis)
• identify categories first
• Remaining questions second
• Researchers nmust ote time permitted for each question (e.g. 30 sec? 15 min?)

Recruit Participants

• If using focus groups, use your sampling strategy

Collect data

• use your interview guide

Data preparation and analysis

• organize answer in most appropriate way
• can count responses, as in content analysis
• Can create time line, as in historical research
• Can group data into themes, as in policy research
• look for signposts and patterns
• explain the patterns