For my project, I chose to do a literature review on the subject of focus groups, specifically looking for “dos and don’ts” and suggestions for types of research questions to which they might be most effectively employed.
My first update is an annotated bibliography of 12 articles I have pulled thus far. I have been particularly interested in several articles I found (some of which are included on the deliverable I submitted, and some of which I haven’t finished yet and will be on my next update) on the differences in face-to-face (F2F) focus groups and “virtual” focus groups (i.e. focus groups conducted by means of computer-mediated communications (CMC) modes). Apparently some research has indicated that there is actually better interaction/ more questions asked and answers discovered during CMC focus groups than F2F… Hmmm!
Another subject I found quite a bit on is the importance of group interaction/ group dynamics in focus groups – particularly the management thereof. Three of the articles I have pulled discuss this at length, and provide suggestions as to techniques that might encourage more participation.
Another thing that rather interested me is how many of the sort of “first tier” articles came from medical and nursing journals (not business journals, which is what I would have guessed…); Also interesting to note that so far I’ve only turned up two different citations to articles discussing the application of focus groups in LIS (in point of fact, although there were two listings, in two different journals, they were effectively the same article by the same author… so I didn’t count them both.) Another thing I noticed was the great variety of “types” of article I found. They were, of course, all from peer-reviewed journals, BUT some of them were only a few pages – while some of them were more the length we would expect (20-30 pages or more) from a journal article.