Natural Interactions in Artificial Situations: Focus Groups as an Active Social Experiment

Abstract

The focus group interviews can provide a unique access to interaction ‘at play’, and can as such serve as a method for investigating the social processes in society (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995, Morgan & Spanish 1984, Meyers & Macnaghten, 1999). Power is an imminent part of the dialogue in interviews (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997; Gubrium & KoroLjungberg, 2005; Kvale, 2006), and in focus groups power relations are even more interwoven with participant interactions than in individual interviews, and are no longer confined to the relation between interviewer and interviewed (Hofmeyer & Scott, 2007). As such focus group data could be framed as on one side a biased by the social setting of the group. On the other side the participant interaction could be viewed as unique data that lets the researcher follow the construction of data. In other words, the focus group interaction can be observed as it were “talk” within a ethnographic study. This dissolves the distinction between interview data and observational data (Halkier, 2010), and as I will argue, between interview-data, observational data and experimental data. More positivistic as well as constructivist approaches do however struggle with what kind of validity focus group data has. This is reflected in questions as to what degree focus group discussions reflect real life situations, and, what can be considered a finding and what is a bias.