Collaborative Focus Group Analysis: Co-Constructing Reality through Researcher-Participant Dialogues

Background:

Collaborative Focus Group Analysis [CFGA] is a newly developed qualitative methodology from a social constructionist frame of reference. It adopts the usage of reflecting team in family therapy which gives client multiple perspectives from a team of therapists, and this sharing of ideas reveals new possibilities for the client. CFGA aims at facilitating an unequivocal dialogue between scholars and research participants, and expanding participants’ perspectives on their lived experience. Rooting in social constructionism, the CFGA elicits multiple realities that are socially constructed based on people’s interaction on perception and language. It is developed for transpiring the research processes and demystifying the data analysis process in a collaborative and inclusive manner.

Methods:

The authors have adopted the CFGA with 19 Chinese adult clients with eczema who were recruited from the community (aged 18-63; 13 females, 6 males). A reflecting team was formed which comprised of dermatologist, social workers, social science researchers, and advocate of local skin disease self-help group. The CFGA started with a 15-minute introduction to patients and the reflecting team, followed by a 2-hour focus group discussion. During focus group discussion, the reflecting team observed the discussion through simultaneous broadcast system in another room. Afterwards, the client group and the reflecting team switched place and the clients could watch how the reflecting team generated themes and categorised concepts. Both the client group and reflecting team would gather for an interactive discussion and debriefing at the end of the CFGA. All of the processes were recorded and was transcribed into verbatim. From October 2015, the authors have conducted two arounds of CFGA. The data was analyzed in accordance with the principles and procedures of Kathy Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory, including line-by-line coding and memo-writing.

Findings:

The theme, “reconstructing participants’ verbal disclosed realities”, was emerged in the collaborative focus group discussion. Through listening to the discussion by the reflection team, three clients have coincidentally refined their own narratives on their illness experience. Such narrative reconstruction was usually inapplicable in the conventional research methodology when the interview only took place once and when the intended participants were treated only as a subject being studied. With the voices of the clients being heard and executed refinement, they would be feeling empowered and allowed exercising multiplicity of selves in the setting.

Conclusion and Implications:

CFGA is an innovative participatory research methodology involving exchange of viewpoints by research participants and reflecting team based on social constructionism. It is operated in a collaborative and inclusive manner to open up the research processes to the research participants and to exercise respect on the multiplicity. Studies on the cost-effectiveness of the CFGA, as well as participants’ benefit from the CFGA, could be further directions of this innovative qualitative method.