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 assuch 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 & Koro- Ljungberg, 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. This chapter discuss the question of how the validity of focus group data can be reframed when approaching focus groups as social experiments in a science and technology approach. By using this frame we first of all comes to perceive the focus group discussion as an artificial situation, while the interactions going on in the group can be described as natural occurring data (cf. Silverman, 2007). Thus this approach comes to terms with some of the problems addressed within both positivistic as well as constructivist uses of focus group methods. Secondly, framing focus groups as social experiments also highlights possibilities of a more active use of groups (by intervention) that resembles the interviewing situations as an active ethnomethodological breaching. It is within this framework of “stimulated or irritated” natural occurring data that focus groups will be discussed.