Focus Groups as Social Process: Arguing for a Proactive Moderator Role

by

Morgan Y. Liu

Ford Foundation Project Workshop
5 August 1997, Kyiv, Ukraine


In this essay, I evaluate the moderator’s role in the focus groups conducted during September through October 1996 in Uzbekistan as part of the Ford Foundation-funded project, "Social Issues and Identity Formation in Estonia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan". I argue for a reformulated moderator role -- more proactive in specific aspects of discussion-leading but more restrained in others - and believe that it would enrich focus group discussions with more depth on each topic, fuller insight into participant’s perspectives, and greater overall coherence. The three parts of this essay discuss three aspects of moderator style that can greatly affect the quality of focus group discussions.

First, moderators did not prompt participants to elaborate on the meanings of important terms that they use in their opinions, but instead pushed the discussion briskly through the agenda before depth and cross-participant interaction could develop in a given topic.

Second, instead of letting participants develop the issues in their own terms, moderators tended to generalize proffered opinions into their own categories which sometimes had different connotations.

Third, I challenge the "minimal intervention" heuristic principle of focus group moderating: when the moderator keeps aloof from the substance of the discussion, speaking only to direct its turn-taking and course, participants supposedly express comments most representative of their true thinking. The underlying assumption is that the opinions that focus groups are to solicit are all already fully formed and articulated in the participant prior to the discussion. I argue, however, that the focus group can do more than expose pre-set opinions but also allow participants in the course of discussion to refine their understandings, clarify them, and even to coalesce them into articulate form for the first time. They can confront participants with the unreflected and underdeveloped aspects of and contradictions in their thinking, and incite them to push the envelope of their opinions. If we consider the kinds of in-discussion opinion development as a valuable contribution to our results, then we would want to encourage their proper development by an appropriately proactive moderator.

(1) Unpacking Loaded Concepts

Moderators need to actively press participants to spell out what the participants mean when they use terms that are packed with multiple meanings and encourage discussions that go beyond frequently-offered responses and reveal how the concepts intersect with their daily lives? Unfortunately, there are many instances in the Uzbekistan focus groups where this sort of depth was never pursued. I show a transcript example from the Bukhara Tajik Men focus group, where interesting comments about the meanings of ‘democracy’ where cut off by the moderator in the interest of keeping to his procedural schedule. Then, I work through an occasion when the moderator did a splendid job in pressing the participants to spell out the meanings and implications of their comments, from the Tashkent Russian Women focus group. The moderator made relevant connections to previously mentioned themes and was even quick to catch an apparent contradiction in a participant’s comment. This focus group was distinguished from all the other Uzbekistan focus groups by more unmediated cross-interaction, more opinion volunteering, more willingness to disagree, and more attention to the general significance of the issues. I see the moderator’s active style of leading as playing an important contributing role to the discussion’s notable dynamism.

(2) Preserving the Level of Abstraction

For the second point, moderators should allow participants to articulate their opinions at the level of generality and scale of applicability that they themselves choose (personal, familial, local neighborhood, city-wide, regional, or national/societal) rather than trying to force comments into a pre-determined level of abstraction. The way focus group participants frame their problems or improvements is itself data about their perspectives. What I found, however, was that when moderators solicited the initial lists of "Improvements" and "Deteriorations", most tended to shoehorn p articipants’ comments into generalized, societal trends, no matter how the participants first phrased them. This rhetorical move tended to shape the course of the discussion toward the moderators’ categories and away from the original intentions and connotations of the participant. I contrast two excepts of good and bad moderator style in this respect, from the Tashkent Uzbek Men and Bukhara Tajik Men focus groups, and discuss theoretically what kinds of richness is lost when moderators normalize level of abstraction. Thus in this aspect of style, the moderator needs to show more restraint.

(3) Dialogically Emergent Opinions

In the final section, I propose a set of proactive moderator techniques that may lead to unprecedented depth and elaboration in focus group discussions. These include: prompting the participants to comment on each others’ comments, and asking them to reconcile their stated opinions with countervailing evidence or views raised previously in the discussion or perhaps introduced by the moderator. It would particularly interesting to see discussions of this type surrounding complex questions like "W ho is to blame". If moderators could press participants in this way to go beyond simple one-word or one-phrase stands on issues of blame, tacit notions of social agency, responsibility, and causality can perhaps be coaxed out.

These proposals are meant to be modular (they can be used or excluded independently of each other), gradable (each can be used to the extent appropriate to the research aims), and supplementary (they can be used after more traditional leading methods, such as polling everyone for an opinion). Together, they constitute an attempt to expand possibilities of what focus groups can contribute to social science research by using the moderator to carefully incite or help crystallize participants’ opinions du ring the focus group moment. The goal is not to change or manipulate people’s minds, but to catalyze articulations of implicit understandings that inform thematic thinking but lie usually in the background. By doing so, we can have deeper insight into the supporting belief systems that frame the proffered opinions.

When participants parrot official slogans, a proactive moderator maybe able to probe whether they have thought them through and how consistent they are with the participant’s other beliefs. A moderator who presses the person to square a proffered opin ion against their other beliefs might bring the participants to realize that their positions are not so easily tenable in their familiar formulations. What they answer in such situations can also yield valuable insight into their perspectives, because th ey have to dialogically negotiate their ideas with newly-presented tensions. Thus, these kinds of proactive moderator techniques can reveal thinking that is dialogic and processual rather than static and pre-formed. By doing so, focus groups can more fu lly capture the human capacity to understand and interpret its world, a capacity which is, after all, always in process of negotiation. And by embracing the expression of shifting opinions in the flow of the focus group moment, we are abandoning the myth of focus groups as being aloof from social process, but are seeking to take advantage of their unique kind of participation in it.

 

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