Focus Groups and Ethnography
Author(s): MICHAEL AGAR and JAMES MacDONALD
Source: Human Organization , Spring 1995, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 78-86
Published by: Society for Applied Anthropology
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44126575
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Human Organization, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1995
Copyright © 1995 by the Society for Applied Anthropology
0018-7259/95/010078-09$!. 40/1
Focus Groups and Ethnography
MICHAEL AGAR and JAMES MacDONALD
Focus groups continue to grow in popularity as a method of applied social research. The two authors, anthropolog
ethnographers, show how a particular focus group with former LSD-using adolescents dovetailed with other ethn
By looking at a focus group transcript using a simplified version of techniques in conversational analysis, and by i
utterances as indexes of more comprehensive "folk-models" derived from other data, focus groups yield richer u
than a simple stand-alone use can provide.
Key words: conversational analysis, drug use, ethnographic method, focus group
FOCUS Kendall GROUPS 1946) that are developed sociological in advertising methods (Merton and market- andKendall 1946) that developed in advertising and marketing,
but have recently mushroomed into a widely used method
of social research. As anthropologists, we view this development
with some skepticism. Our intuition is that a few hours
with a few groups guarantees only that the "quality" in "qualitative"
will go the way of fast food. At the same time, the senior
author recently heard reports from several members of a national
epidemiological panel that showed how focus groups
turned quantitative researchers into fascinated listeners to
human voices. Even if focus groups accomplish nothing else,
this result alone suggests that they be taken seriously.
It is clear that focus groups are here to stay; it is also clear
that they play an important role in the politics of social research
that any anthropologist would support. We decided to explore
how an interest in focus groups could be developed into a more
elaborate interest in ethnographic research. What we want to
show in this article is that there are two answers. First, ethnography
provides broader frames of interpretation in terms of
which focus group details take on added significance. Second,
ethnographic methods of transcript analysis add depth to an
understanding of what actually occurred in a particular focus
group session.
In this article, then, we take a focus group and justify these
two answers. We were handed an excellent opportunity for the
exercise. Over several months we collaborated on a study of
adolescent LSD users. Based on several ethnographic interviews
with former users and parents, as well as news clippings
and other written materials, we'd put together a report on what
Michael Agar is a professor in the Department of Anthropology,
University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742. James MacDonald
does ethnographic and computer consulting with Softext Communications,
4021 Davis PL NW, Washington DC 20007. The research
reported in this article was supported by T. Head, Inc. , ofRockville
MD, on a National Institute on Drug Abuse contract No. 1 DA-
3-5201 supervised by George Beschner, whose comments we gratefully
acknowledge.
we'd found (MacDonald and Agar 1994). We decided to do a
focus group, with adolescents we hadn't interviewed, to check
the role a focus group might play vis-à-vis other ethnographic
data.
The key characteristic of focus groups, according to Morgan's
Focus Groups as Qualitative Research , is "the explicit use of
the group interaction to produce data and insights that would
be less accessible without the interaction found in a group"
(1988:12). The difference, when compared to an interview, is
that the focus group members talk with each other in addition
to the interviewer. The difference, when compared with participant
observation, is that the group is talking about a topic introduced
by a moderator rather than one they generated in a
natural situation.
Krueger, in his Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied
Research , says that: "a focus group can be defined as a carefully
planned discussion designed to obtain perceptions on a defined
area of interest in a permissive, nonthreatening environment"
(1988:18). The contradiction between "carefully planned" and
"permissive" contains the same contrast that Morgan lays out
when he talks of the groups as both "controlled" and "naturalistic."
Even at this definitional level, some interesting problems
appear, problems that will surface in the detailed look at transcripts
to come.
This isn't the only hint of complications. For example, a
focus group works to the extent that group members discuss
the topic among themselves. But there is an outsider, the moderator,
and probably an observer as well, who are responsible
for the group and the topics to be discussed. Too much moderator
control prevents the group interaction that is the goal; too
little control, and the topics might never be discussed.
As another example, a "frequent goal" of a focus group is to
"conduct a group discussion that resembles a lively conversation
among friends or neighbors" (Morgan 1988:22). At the
same time, the general strategy is to make up the group out of
"strangers." But it is not automatic that a group of strangers will
have a "lively conversation" about anything. In fact, a judgment
as to whether a conversation occurred, lively or not, is a delicate
matter that calls for some close analysis of transcripts.
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Before we talk about such issues, we need to tell the story
of our focus group. To prepare for our focus group meeting,
the two authors met and listed six topical "foci"- what Krueger
calls the "questioning route"- issues that were pivotal in the
original report. We decided that we both would moderate, and
would talk with each other during the session as well, our goal
being to reduce the role of the lone, authoritarian moderator
figure- a naive goal, as it turned out. We rehearsed the opening
lines, tossed the tape recorders into the car, and drove to the
meeting that we had been reassured would be ready to goeven
more naive, as you'll see shortly.
In summary, the youths did talk about the topics we introduced,
and what they said supported and complicated what
we'd found in our analysis. But, as conversational analysts
would have predicted, the structure of a focus group sets constraints
on the interaction. Turns are usually short, moderator
control is inevitable, a few group members dominate, and group
formation sets up constraints on what can be said. And, as ethnographers
would have predicted, only the prior qualitative
work made interpretation of focus group results possible.
Without that prior work, a naive adult would have learned that
a lot of kids were using LSD, that the situation was much more
complicated than he/she had thought, but little else. Such a
lesson in itself has some value, since it is important to demonstrate
that the kids had something interesting and intelligent
to say about their drug use. The addition of broader ethnographic
context and more detailed transcript analysis, however,
offers more.
The Group
The story of the formation of our focus group is a comedy
of errors. We'd done our earlier ethnographic analysis with
former LSD users in a treatment program and planned to do
the group with the young clients as well. The program staffwe
want to be clear on this important point- were praised by
our interviewees, supported and encouraged our study, and
spent time to help us out. At the same time, they are incredibly
overworked, underpaid, mental health professionals with more
kids to take care of than they can reasonably handle, given
budget cuts, increasing demands for their services, and the
LSD "boom" in the metropolitan suburb where they work.
From our selfish research point of view, they didn't make the
preparations for the group that we'd expected. We'd asked for
a group of former LSD users, young people we hadn't interviewed
before, for a session to last from one-and-a-half to two
hours. "No problem," we were told. The date was set.
On that appointed day we arrived in the waiting room and
talked with a group member. He had no idea who we were or
what was about to happen. We met the counselor at the time
the group was to have started, and he said he'd tell the participants
what we wanted to do and say they could leave if they
wanted. After he finished his discussion and we set up the
equipment, he told us several of them would have to leave at
seven, which left us roughly forty-five minutes of time.
The two authors entered the meeting room. The young
people filed in, counselor in tow. He told them, sympathetically
and accurately, who we were and what we wanted to do.
Three of them walked out. We were left with four stiffly seated
youths who looked at us and the recording equipment as if they
were in one of the circles of hell - not the ninth, but close.
Both authors, as they discussed at length after the event, felt
like the situation was at this point already a disaster. But we
pressed on. No sooner had we started than the counselor
walked in with another participant, one who, he said "needed
to be in this group." The young man had no idea what was going
on. His words are featured in an example to come, but for a
long time he simply sat silently and stared at the tape recorder.
With our group of five participants and two moderators, we
launched off into the focus group.
The group history taught us two things. First, a focus group
that started off under what we might generously call less than
perfect circumstances produced something of value, though the
value derived from its relationship to other ethnographic work.
In retrospect this is no surprise, because even disasters- maybe
especially disasters- count as ethnographic data.
Second, and most important for the focus group literature,
every focus group has a story behind it. Where is it? Why isn't
it routinely reported in focus group accounts? Certainly the literature
we've consulted emphasizes how critical the selection
of group members is. And certainly we violated the "strangers"
rule, since the youth all knew each other. But we suspect that
many focus groups are drawn together through networks, that
they are products of institutional processes that powerfully
shape them. Such histories belong in the focus group data
for, without them, it's difficult to evaluate the scope of what
was learned.
Robitussin
One of the issues we'd tackled in the earlier report, logically
enough, was, "why do kids use LSD?" We thought we'd come
up with some answers, some good ones, from the kids' point
of view. Needless to say, we'd listed this as topic A in our focus
group plan.
What follows is an excerpt from an early portion of the
group. Some conventions of transcriptions need to be explained,
since they are done in a style developed in conversational
analysis.
Punctuation signals tone- a period is the "I'm done" falling
tone; a comma is a rising "more to come;" a question mark signals
the rising question intonation.
Pauses are indicated in several ways. An "=" signals a runon,
without the usual pause; a "+" indicates a longer than expected
pause; if the pauses are longer than two seconds, the
actual length is indicated in parentheses.
A colon after a sound indicates that the sound was stretched
out, given how that speaker usually speaks; underlining means
that a particular word was emphasized, through stress and/or
volume, more so than what was expected.
The "//" marks indicate where two speakers overlapped.
Transcriptions can be much more detailed than this, and in
some cases the use of the conventions is a close judgment call.
But the conventions do allow us to ground some interpretations
in ways that typical focus group transcripts don't.
Here is the transcript. "MA" is the first author; "JM" is the
second author; the other initials label the participants. The
numbers indicate where we are on the tape according to the
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counter on the recorder. We should note that turns 9 through
16 are an aside -C accidentally called T ("Ted") by his real
name rather than the pseudonym he'd chosen.
074.
1 MA. why do people use lsd. = what's the advantages. = what do
they get out of it. why//
2 T. //can can you compare it to robitussin?
3 MA. can I compare it to ro-can you compare it to //robitussin.
4 T. //yeah
5 MA. (2.6) can you compare it-are
6 T. //no ....
7 C. //it's totally different
J.
8 T. no, // it's no:t.
9 C. Ill mean T. (laugh)
10 MA. (laugh) Ted. that's Ted over there/ / Ted Koppel, We have
Ted
11C. //yeah, (laugh)
12 MA. Koppel // here.
13 C. //yeah.
14 T. Ted Nugent.
15 C. Ted Nugent, (laugh)
16 MA. Ted Nugent. +
17 T. no you you can't compare it to like 1- you know I mean you
can't compare lsd with like robitussin. +
18 C. they're two totally different things T.
19 T. not necess-well / / they're two totally different things but
20 N. //
21 T. they do the //same thing.
22 C. //well yeah but it's still different. (2.7)
23 MA. you te-you te-you tell-this is news. Talk-tell me some
more.
24 JM. how well how do they do the same thing?
25 T. you don't know about robitussin?
26 MA. I know what it is, sure, but/ /uh
27 T. //you drink like a whole
bottle of it, it'll make you like + tri:p, see trai :1s and everything. +
28 MA. huh.
29 T. it'll really mess you up.
30 C. (laugh)
31 MA. lesson number one. (laugh)
32 T. . . . heres done robitussin? You done robitussin?
33 J. only when it was safe.
(several laugh)
(3.19)
34 C. robo:, stay away from that. uch.
35 MA. So some folks would do would do //like
36 T. //mm hmm. lot of
people, if they can't get their hands on acid they'll do
37 MA. //they'll do
robitussin.
38 N. just go steal robitussin.
39 MA. for Christ's sake. huh.
40 C. (laugh)
41 MA. du:h. I had no idea. And what is- so: what is it about
those two. I mean let's s:ay for a sec those are equivalent, what's why
do why do people- what is it doing for em. what's- is it the
trails? is it- what, what are- what //what's the story, what's the
42 T. //um hmm. . . .
43 MA. drive, what's the what's the interest?
44 T. the loss of + being able to think straight.
45 MA. sorry?
46 T. the loss of being able to think straight, feeling like a
I dunno.
47 MA. I do that for a livin.
48 C. (laugh)
cough
(4.8)
49 JM. so, m- is that i:t? Is that all there is about acid? (5.2)
50 C. Ilm:
51 ? //u:h
52 JM. //what- I mean + why would anyone m:ess
robitussin you can get it at the drugstore.
53 T. well every t- every time I guess you do acid you you
you know you don't have //the same exact thing over
54 C. //cause it doesn't- right.
55 T. when you get drunk, usually, you get drunk on
thing it's gonna be- you're gonna get drunk the same w
do acid everything's + you know everytime you do acid
happens- different is gonna happen.
56 MA. huh. does that corres -does that make sense to the / /
57 T. //cause
all acid's differ
ma: de the sa: me. 122
This passage occurred early in the group discussion. Neither
MA nor JM, after several interviews, had come across the use
of Robitussin, a legally available cough medicine, as an LSD
substitute. One interviewee had mentioned Robitussin casually,
in passing, but neither of us picked it up as a significant
topic worth further exploration.
There's a reason Robitussin popped up as an issue early on,
an obvious one upon later reflection. T, who introduced the
topic, turned out to dominate the first phase of the group discussion.
The pattern was already clear in this brief segment.
T had never used LSD, though he had used Robitussin. T established
his expertise, his right to talk, by pushing Robitussin
onto the floor. He tried to dominate the talk by pushing his
other topics onto the floor for the rest of the session. But whatever
the personal motivation of one group member, the fact remains.
The focus group immediately produced a surprise that
nothing in our previous research had revealed. The possible
use of Robitussin, "Robo" as C called it, as a substitute for LSD
is a piece of the contemporary drug puzzle we hadn't known
much about.
We think this is one place where focus groups shine.
Through group interaction, we learn that something we hadn't
noticed before is a significant issue for drug-experienced young
people. This lively group interaction is obviously something
that can't happen in an individual interview. Turns 17 through
22 show one stretch where three youths engage the issue, as
do 32 through 38, though with moderator comments in that segment
as well. The structure of pauses and overlaps makes its
lively nature explicit.
From the way the group takes up the topic, it is clear that
something significant is going on, something significant to
them. A new piece of the territory is revealed. The focus group
won't tell you where it fits in with other parts of the landscape,
nor will it tell you much about how the new territory looks,
but it will tell you that it's there.
One reason why the information will be sketchy lies in the
interactional structure of the group. (A second reason, the
shared knowledge of group members, is discussed later.) What
kind of structure is a focus group? It is somewhere between a
meeting and a conversation. A meeting has a manager, someone
who introduces topics and allocates turns to speakers, a person
called the "moderator" in the case of focus groups. A conver-
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sation is a looser structure, with turns and topics up for grabs
among people with equal rights to the floor.
As a meeting , the focus group is called by somebody, for a
reason. To the extent that group members participate, they look
to the moderator to start it, guide it, and stop it. Going in we
had in mind strategies to minimize our controlling role, because
we felt that some earlier focus group transcripts we'd
looked at showed too much control by the moderator. With a
method that featured group interactions, we thought the moderator
should keep his nose out of it whenever possible.
We might as well have started to drive by deciding it wasn't
such a good idea to steer. Trace the initials down the left side
of the transcript and see how long it takes until an "MA" or
"JM" appears. Notice that at the pauses at 5, 22, 33, and 50,
pauses that go beyond the two second limit that indicates that
the silence has stretched on longer than usual (Chafe 1979), a
moderator jumps in to fill in the dead air space with a comment
or question. It was our group and everyone knew who was responsible
for it.
Group members looked to us to guide where it was we
wanted to go. This is evident in 2, where T introduces a topic
by asking a question of the moderator, and throughout in the
way the moderators' questions are taken seriously, that is,
where the participants work to figure out some kind of response.
What this pattern means is that, to some extent, the raison
d'être of focus groups is contradicted by their structure. Their
great strength, says the literature, is that they allow group members
to interact in ways that they would ordinarily do out there
in their daily lives. But a conversation over coffee isn't the same
as a meeting in a group. Conversations don't have alien moderators
with questions on their mind that, for whatever reason,
the group has decided to take seriously and to which they orient
their discussion.
So, focus groups are, in part, meetings. In meetings, the manager
runs things and asks questions and the participants respond.
Our job, in this sample transcript, was to pursue the
question, "Why do kids use LSD?" Suddenly "Robo" came upit
even had a nickname, a sure sign of its centrality. But we
couldn't drop everything and scatter into a discussion of "Robo."
We didn't know enough to ask questions yet. Given the group's
disagreement, we didn't even know if it truly had a strong connection
to LSD. We hadn't had time to digest the surprise, a
surprise evident in MA's moderator turns at 23, 28, 31, 39, and
41. We had a limited amount of time and several topics to cover.
Another reason why focus group information is sketchy has
to do with the conversation rather than the meeting aspect. In
American conversations, turns are typically short, and a
couple of members usually dominate. In this transcript, a pattern
emerges that characterizes much of what was to come. At
first T dominates; C comments here and there; the rest of the
group wait in the background, and, when they do talk, it is
often so light that the recorder barely picks it up. About twothirds
of the way through the group discussion the pattern
changes. T struggles with J for domination and loses. J, a
former heavy LSD user, takes over due to more personal experience
with the designated topic, as will be shown in a section
to come. Shortly after that struggle T leaves the group. By
and large this conversational structure defines how the group
goes.
What we're getting here in the example transcript are short
verbal bursts from two group members out of five. This is not
the focus group dream, which envisions all members speaking
with each other elaborately so that outsiders can get a sense
of the details of their world. The focus group is, in part, a conversation,
and conversations have dominant members and brief
turns at talk. In an individual interview, the lone interviewee
is dominant, with all the time he or she needs to develop a line
of thought.
The focus group is an ambiguous beast, both meeting and
conversation. The two moderators took different ways through
the ambiguity. MA took on a more conversational role. The
problem here is that moderator formulations and comments
can be taken as conclusive, ending the flow of talk, rather than
as invitations to continue the topic, as would be the case in actual
conversations. JM plays a more directive role by asking
questions. The problem here is that questions can highlight the
authority of the moderator and place youths in a performing
and evaluative mode.
In some cases such strategies work. But an excellent example
of how both strategies can disrupt interaction appears
at the end of the transcript. In 48 MA makes a self-deprecating
statement as a group participant. C laughs, as she often does,
but other than that the comment produces almost five seconds
of dead time, a massive pause given the usual two second limit.
JM comes next with a question, one that implies that the youths
haven't told us enough, and this strategy results in another five
second pause. The two moderator strategies represent conversation
and meeting at their extremes. The long pauses show
that neither "pure" strategy worked smoothly in this particular
case. On the other hand, JM's question does elicit an important
bit of validation of the earlier study.
This passage shows the focus group at its best. We learned
something new and confirmed something old. The group context
enables both types of results, since the reactions of others
signal whether statements are significant from the group's point
of view, and it is the group point of view that is the goal of ethnographic
research. At the same time, the passage shows how the
structure of focus groups, both as meeting and as conversation,
limits the amount of information and sets up contradictory expectations
for the moderator. The group offers evaluations of
significance, something you don't get in individual interviews.
But the individual interview opens large spaces for an individual
voice to articulate the texture of his or her world, something
that seldom happens in a focus group.
The Quiet Ones
There were , however, a couple of moments in the focus
groups that approached the nature of individual interviews.
One moment in particular is worth showing, since it makes explicit
how one voice was silent and why.
Earlier, we mentioned that one young man was brought in
late to the group. He was told he "needed to be in this group"
by the counselor. He had no idea what was going on and, for
the most part, sat quietly while the others, usually T and C and
the moderators, talked. His consciousness of the tape popped
up at 283, when he agreed with something and was told that
he had to talk because "We can't hear him nod on the tape." At
325 he raised his hand, and this exchange followed:
JM. no no no no, you're not (laugh) supposed to raise //your
J. //I'm sorry
who are these tapes
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JM. hand, just talk. What?
J. who are these tapes for?
JM. oh you don't //know this stuff?
T. //for your parents
MA. C. (laugh)
327
There follows a discussion of the study, who's paying for it, and
who'll hear the tapes, a discussion that we don't reproduce here.
Finally, at 345, JM asks J a direct question. J, it turns out, is
the only group member with extensive LSD experience, and
he launches into the kind of things we had heard in the interviews,
fending off T's rude attempt to gain the floor along the
way, rude because he interrupts mid-clause rather than at what
the conversational analysts call a "possible completion point."
We mentioned this struggle in the preceding section, when we
noted that shortly after his loss of the floor, T left the group.
1 JM. and what's your experience.
2 J. oh it's nothing like what they all s- I mean -I- when I dosed
it was like -I- my eyes were open, right, I could see, right, I saw- I
could see everything. + it wasn't that I was seeing little men or
seeing chairs moving, I was just awake, you know I could -I- 1 1
could smell the flowers you know. I was just alive, I mean I wasn't
like in a .... //
3 T. //wa- you could smell the flo:wers even like
they're ten feet away?
4 J. I'm not saying like that. = I'm saying the air was fresh.
//I was appreciating the world more, and uh, I don't know,
5 T. //oh
6 J. and people that were nice seemed nicer and people that
were rude seemed ruder and everything was just clear and straight
ahead, //and everything was real honest and flat out and
7 MA. //huh
8 J. you could really understand the way everything worked, and
you were just- your eyes were like opened, you know, you could
you could understand, I mean it was just a good feeling just to
have everything laid out fo:r you, and to under- to know to know
the way things are and to understand the way things are, and like,
you know and you could say, well that person has a little good in
them, and that person doesn't have any good. I mean, you know,
you can you know look at the trees and take nature in,
it's groo:vy, //I mean, but you know, that's like the past, ....
9 C. //(light laugh)
10 J
1 1 MA. That's a nice description.
12 J. Well I mean it's just
13 MA. Well that sounds that sounds
kind of // clarity and appreciation and
14 J. //yeah
yeah, and I mean emotions were a lot c
everything was just -I- up there, just the
that was my experience.
15 MA. that was well said. (3.4) how a
respond with with what some of the re
perienced either way?
16 C. sounds right. (2.9)
17 N. some people see trails and some
18 J. you see, you sometimes have a lit
a couple of minutes. I'm talking about
talking about the overall attitude, not no
but what you're thinking, what's going
it's not it's not I mea
you know, I mean th
perience is just very
up, most of the tim
19 MA. //uh huh
20 J. know, seven tim
21 MA. huh (3.4)
20 JM. hhh. ss. so wha
of kids do acid?
21 T. anybody.
22 C. //
23 JM. //jocks? 3
To say that th
meeting/conversat
ment. J's descrip
other group mem
is like most of o
enced, articulate
his drug experien
MA and JM play
ment we examine
J into his descrip
role with backcha
in 11, 13, and 15.
after the long pau
has to say, and tr
J's story and N
bothers J and lea
he's saying is m
finishes, a long
M A's backchanne
tioner, a move t
shown in the pre
JM's question is
tion, in turn 2,
"nothing like wh
from the other m
some general eff
taking LSD in ear
it for clarity, cl
around him.
After JM asks his question, the discussion centers on the traditional
social categories that always come up- jocks, head
bangers, and the like. The irony is that J may have just taught
us how to ask the question better, that the kinds of youth who
use LSD don't map onto the available social categories, but
rather onto the different purposes they have in mind. This, like
the topic of Robitussin, counts as a new idea that came out of
the focus group, one deserving of further research.
In this segment we learned the power and importance- and
beauty- of a voice we almost missed hearing. J finally asked
a question about the tape that made explicit the reasons for his
silence, reasons we dealt with that then led him to talk. But
when he talked, he took us into a segment that was more ethnographic
interview than conversation/meeting interaction.
Statements were no longer brief; the moderator was no longer
in control. The emphasis shifted from group evaluations of
topic significance to a single person's voice articulating his
experience.
The segment with J leads us to another question for any
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focus group. Who are those silent voices in the group? Why
aren't they talking? What do they have to say?
Indexed Talk
Now we would like to show how the ethnographic research
we did prior to the focus group enabled interpretation of the
abbreviated focus group talk in a way that led to a productive
interaction between both kinds of data. For our purposes here,
the results of the earlier analysis will be called folk models
(Holland and Quinn 1987), frames of interpretation that we assume
group members share, frames that we as analysts attempt
to partially model. The term "folk" is used to signal that the
world of some group of people is of interest; it is their point
of view rather than the point of view of outsiders. "Model" is
meant to suggest an analyst's construct, with the assumption
that they are models of group members' resources, from the
analyst's point of view, that help outsiders understand what
they tell us.
Different relationships hold between talk and folk models
during a focus group and during an ethnographic interview. In
interviews talk usually explains the folk model; in a focus
group, talk usually indexes it. Ethnographic interviews typically
involve two people, one, the ignorant interviewer, the
other, the knowing interviewee. During a successful interview
the interviewer mostly listens and the interviewee mostly talks.
The interviewee tries to explain things fully and make motives
and actions clear to the interviewer. The folk model is made
explicit through narration, exposition, and description, genres
of talk we will lump together here as explanation.
This interviewer/interviewee relation can also appear in
focus groups, as we showed in the previous section, when a
group member, J, took the floor and explained things to the
moderators. But when group members interact among themselves,
they generally share folk models, so in their own interaction
they can briefly refer to things known in common rather
than explain them. In the words of the ethnomethodologists,
the folk models are being indexed rather than explained.
Consider the example of being "fried," or showing the signs
of overuse of LSD. The fact that adolescents may quit using
LSD because they have taken too much was brought up during
both the interviews and the focus group, but the way "being
fried" was talked about was different in the two contexts.
During the interviews the adolescents explained the meaning
of being fried by LSD to the interviewer. (Since we're no longer
analyzing interaction, the transcripts are presented in a simpler
form.)
Interviewer: What made you decide to try to quit? Was it that
[bad] trip?
I was tired of doing it so much, you know. I couldn't- I wasn't sleeping
at all during the night. I went to school the next day, you know I'd fall
asleep in classes, I was failing a lot of my classes. I couldn't sleep cause
I was you know eating so much of it, I guess I just got tired of it for
awhile, take a break from it.
I know people and my friends know people that were just getting good
grades, actively participating in school. I mean like going to school
and had nice lives. Two years later after consistent using, their lives
are shit and they don't care, and that seems like a typical oh, drugs
are going to waste you, but it happens sometimes, it really does.
The adolescents explained being fried during the interview;
but among themselves, during the focus group, they just made
reference to it. Here's an example:
MA: .... There were a lot of different reasons- possible reasons
why a person would stop using LSD.
C. Brain would fry out.
T. They start getting burnt.
C. Yeah, really, remember Noah.
T. Really.
JM: What happened?
T. Burnt to a crisp.
C. Fried.
J. He can't remember his name sometimes.
C. Yeah, he is pretty bad, pretty bad.
When the general topic "possible reasons why a person
would quit LSD" was introduced by the moderator, C quickly
volunteered being "fried" as one possible reason. This idea was
then reiterated and confirmed by T, and a shared reference, a
friend known to both, was offered and accepted as an example
of becoming fried and then quitting. During this exchange
there were nods and sounds of agreement from other group
members.
Being fried is a major reason for quitting LSD. The use of
the term in the focus group, in ways that the analysis of interviews
led us to expect, strongly confirms this part of the folk
model, but there is no clear explanation in the focus group of
what being fried actually is. A part of the folk model the authors
had postulated based on a wealth of explanation in the
earlier interview study was supported; but during the focus
group there was no explanation, and therefore no possibility
of building to that same conclusion from the focus group itself.
Another conclusion we reached after the earlier interviews
was that one of the adolescent's main objectives in tripping is
to transform his or her surroundings through a limited loss of
control. The location, activity, social group, and drug dose of
a trip are manipulated so that control can be lost without the
user actually being in danger. Limited loss of control leads to
a good trip, but if too much control is lost a trip can become
very bad. This part of the adolescent LSD folk model was
indexed many times and in many ways during the focus group
interaction.
C, a non-LSD user, referred to this situation when she described
how the outcome of a trip is sensitive to dose and location.
Her comment specified why all trips are different:
C. Yeah, it depends on how much you take too or where you are. It's
all kind of like a mind thing.
J, the frequent LSD user, made a less obvious reference to the
same idea in these interview-style elaborate comments about
bad trips:
I mean, where, if like- if like some cops start drivin by your house,
I mean it's more than one, even if it is just one. You know, and you're
gonna start talking to yourself, that's especially if you're like alone.
If you're with a lot of people, and you know you're cool, and you know
you're safe, then you just get your mind in that frame. But if you're
not like by yourself, like in your house, and you're just like looking
out the windows, and it's like I don't know, it's all the way you think.
It's all in your mind.
VOL. 54, NO. 1 SPRING 1995 83
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An even less direct connection to control and situation is
made in this comment by Cy about one aspect of an exciting
trip (Cy only talked at the end of the session, after T had gone):
Cy. Adrenalin rush. Yeah, like if the cops find you and you're like
runnin away from them or somethin like that, and they're chasing you
or something. Cause I had friends that had been trippin and the cops
found out they were- but it was just like one lady and they outran her.
They said- they said it was like a rush, you know. They like jumped
through bushes. They went through like a creek and stuif. They said
it was fun.
A final example implies the same folk model. It also supports
another inference we drew from the interviews. We suggested
that LSD requires a safe, stress-free location to produce
a good trip, and that this is one reason it was so popular in
affluent suburban settings.
MA. What is it about this chemical that makes it more of a white suburban
drug than any, than anything else? We can't figure it out. Got
any theories?
J. It's probably kind of scary dosing in like a big city. You don't have
the fresh air and you don't have the trees. Big buildings, toxic stuif
in the air, you know it's just all dark, and I mean I'm sure it's done
in the city too, but I'm saying it's a lot more people all around you,
and like a lot more phobic, you know, a claustrophobic kind of thing,
closin in on you. You know there's stuff everywhere around you and
stuff. I mean so it's probably why people you know enjoy it more goin
out a little bit, you know. That's just my theory. I've never heard that
but if I were to think why.
These examples- being fried and a limited loss of control show
how focus group interaction supports a folk model constructed
on the basis of qualitative interviews. The group understands
the implied reference, accepts the utterances, and the
talk moves on without the folk model itself ever being overtly
stated.
But on other occasions, disagreements arise. The introduction
of the idea that Robitussin is "just like LSD," presented in
an earlier section, was an example of this situation. It created
a noticeable difference of opinion. Robitussin and its similarities
to LSD were neglected during the earlier ethnographic
interviews. Only one person mentioned it, and that person
pointed out that the two drugs are not alike.
There was never much physical feeling in it, [LSD] it was all mental
and I think that's how it differs mostly with the Nyquil or Robitussin
or whatever you take.
In the focus group discussion, on the other hand, the reactions
of group members to each other taught us that Robitussin
is a well known and significant drug. It is likely that Robo and
LSD are thought of as being similar in some ways. They are
similar enough for the earlier interviewee to have used their
differences to help define LSD; and they are similar enough for
T to assert that they are the same. But they are also different
enough for the other group members to strongly disagree with
Ts assertion.
The "robo" segment not only verifies a part of the adolescent
LSD folk model we suggested (as the "fried" and "control" segments
did), it also complicates it. The focus group transcript
shows that within a folk model that includes agreement on the
significance of Robitussin, different positions are taken on
what that significance in fact means. The transcript indicates
variations within the folk model. This is something that the
group interaction makes clearly visible, something that an individual
interview can't reveal.
Another interesting discovery emerged when the focus group
was compared with the earlier interviews. This discovery taught
us that not all young people shared all folk models, that, in fact,
some youths shared folk models with parents rather than other
adolescents.
We had anticipated a group of six to eight adolescents with
LSD experience. We ended up with a group of five, only two
of whom had taken LSD; only one of those two, J, had extensive
experience with it. The group members were similar in
many ways. They were the same age, lived in the same suburban
community, and all had extensive exposure to drugs. We
assumed they would share similar opinions and beliefs about
drugs, since they all knew the same suburban drug scene. As
it turned out, some exchanges between the users and the nonusers
contradicted this assumption.
In an earlier interviews we had talked only with heavy LSD
users and with non-using adults. These two kinds of interviewees
were dramatically different when they talked about
LSD. We anticipated that we would get responses from the
focus group that were similar to what we had heard from the
adolescent users . The surprise was that the non-using adolescents
in the focus group were sometimes closer to the adults
than they were to the adolescents who had taken LSD.
When the non-users in the group talked about the kinds of
kids who take LSD or how being fried can lead to quitting,
their statements were like those of the users. They were, in
other words, operating with the same folk model. But when the
non-users described the trip experience itself, or reasons for
taking LSD, they sounded more like the adults had in the
earlier interviews.
The non-users all described the trip experience in a way that
trivialized it, as in these examples taken from the transcript.
T. [The] tree jumped out in front of me.
T. [See], like faces in the tree.
T. The buildings start walking.
C. [You] turn to jello.
N. [You] go to la-la land.
After listening to a number of these characterizations J, the
only heavy user in the group, said, "I don't agree with what
these others said." He then went on to describe his trip experiences
in the semi-poetic way characteristic of the heavy users
we had interviewed, a passage that was quoted at length in the
previous section. He talked of how LSD transforms the world
into a fascinating place where common experiences become
like mythic journeys. He spoke of himself being transformed
and augmented by the drug.
In the earlier interviews, we'd concluded that understanding
the trip experience is the key to understanding why a person
takes LSD and why they quit. The parents' interviews lacked
a model of the experience and, therefore, their explanations of
why kids used LSD was dramatically different from that of the
youths. The non-users in the focus group were similar. Their
characterizations of tripping and their disagreement with the
users on the subject suggest that they viewed the trip experi-
84 HUMAN ORGANIZATION
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enee differently. They resembled the adults more so than the
LSD-using youths.
The non-using youths in the focus group, logically enough,
also share adult models about why people trip. The non-users
mentioned two motivations for LSD use most often mentioned
by the adults, peer pressure and escape.
T. Or just to do it to be social- socially do drugs. It's like a social
drinker.
MA. why do acid?
C. To get fucked up.
N. To escape reality.
These are the standard "push" explanations expressed by the
adults. People are pushed into LSD use by some force outside
them. Heavy LSD users give a "pull" explanation. Their explanations
assume that people are drawn to tripping by the attraction
of the world created through the LSD experience.
The discovery of how the youth folk models differ around
the nature of a trip and reasons for use counts as another surprise,
but, once again it is typical of focus group resultsdiscovery
without explanation. Clearly something is happening
but there isn't enough information to explain what. But
we are left with a fascinating hypothesis. Perhaps the usual social
labels- preps, headbangers, and the like- aren't important
in understanding who uses and why. Perhaps different folk
models around reasons for use separate users from non-users,
models whose social distribution we only glimpse here.
Conclusion
To sum all this up, focus groups and ethnographic research
do stand in several interesting and important relationships to
each other. First of all, the detailed analysis of the transcript
yields more than their usual casual use in focus group summary
reports. Among other things, the detailed analysis shows who
was in charge, which parts were interview-like, meeting-like,
and conversation-like, which topics were lively and which
were flat, how well ratified topics were by the group as a whole,
and who dominated and who was silent. The detailed analysis
is time consuming and requires some training in conversational
analysis, but we hope we've shown that the application of the
method in especially significant portions of the transcript is
worth the effort.
Second, we hope we've also shown that the availability of previously
constructed folk models from other ethnographic data
enables a richer and more significant interpretation of focus
group data. In focus groups, participants should draw on
shared folk models that were, in part, modelled during ethnographic
analysis. Our examples show how sometimes they did
and sometimes they didn't, both results being of value. In several
examples, like being fried and limited loss of control,
group discussion could be interpreted only because of the folk
models we had constructed earlier. But in other examples, like
Robitussin, the discussion suggested variations on the model,
complications that further work must take into account. Finally,
some discussions called into question the assumption
that the youths shared the same folk model at all. In fact the
line between LSD experience and lack of it suggested that nonusing
adolescents shared some models with another outsider
group, the parents.
All of these results are interesting and useful. We might have
felt discouraged during and immediately after the focus group
because we were anticipating the wrong kind of results. As individuals
predisposed to consider ethnographic interviews as
the most important kind of data, we were looking for explanations,
not indexing. We both had committed to minimizing
moderator involvement, and we also wanted to build on the explanations
from the earlier interviews. In other words, we went
into the group thinking of it as a group ethnographic interview.
We were looking for exactly the kind of material that focus
groups are not designed to produce.
We overlooked the fact that the focus group was producing
results, but results of a different kind. Many of our earlier
analyses were being either confirmed or complicated in interesting
ways. This material was not in the form of explanations,
but rather in the form of exchanges among group members, exchanges
that indexed the folk models we had inferred from the
prior ethnographic data. But without the prior folk models, we
couldn't have interpreted what was being indexed.
We can't emphasize this critical relationship enough. The
powerful validation and complication that we found in the
focus group transcripts presupposes prior ethnographic work.
In this research context, we believe the focus group can be a
useful ally. Many of the users of focus groups, however, advocate
them as a stand-alone method, a qualitative shortcut into
the world of focus group members. As far as such an exclusive
use of focus groups goes, we retain the skepticism with which
we opened this article. Without prior knowledge of the folk
models as a base, there's nothing to evaluate the group exchanges
against, nothing in terms of which to register and interpret
the surprises that occur. A focus group can show a researcher
some new territory, but it can't tell you much about
what it is you've just seen. Ethnography helps resolve this
problem, first, by enabling a fine tuned evaluation of the focus
group discourse, second, by providing the interpretive folk
models necessary to understand indexed focus group talk in
more significant ways.
We're not the only ones to have noticed interesting issues in
focus group interaction and the ties between that interaction
and more comprehensive ethnographic work (Swenson, Griswold,
and Kleiber 1992; Fielding and Fielding 1986). At the
same time, Owen Murdoch, an anthropology graduate student
at the University of Maryland, reports that his recent review
of the focus group methods literature shows that the principal
issue of interest is the quantification of focus group data. We
hope we've shown there's another way to think about things,
one that maps more naturally onto the kind of resource that
focus groups can represent.
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VOL. 54, NO. 1 SPRING 1995 85
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