Choose one of the approaches you've explored in previous weeks, and write a reflective post in your blog that answers the following questions. Work though these questions systematically, and try to write a paragraph or two for each:
 
As mentioned on the previews blog post, a Focus Group is a type of in-depth interview accomplished in a group, whose meetings present characteristics defined with respect to the proposal, size, composition, and interview procedures. (FREITAS (H.), OLIVEIRA (M.), JENKINS (M.), and POPJOY (O.)., 1998).
The main purpose of a focus group research is to draw upon respondents’ attitudes, feelings, beliefs, experiences and reactions in a way in which would not be feasible using other methods. (Gibbs, 1997).
To better understand the practical use of Focus Groups here are some Q & A that might help you when assessing a research.

• What three (good) research questions could be answered using this approach?

Since through the focus group the researcher gain insights into people’s shared understandings of everyday life and the ways in which individuals are influenced by others in a group situation (Gibbs, 1997). When looking for this information, you might want to have questions which allow participants to begin with a conversation and keep them going.
For example,
What does the clients like most about a product?
Which activities are best for children K-12 to learn English?
What does the public appreciate the most when going to X restaurant?
As you can see, these three questions could be answered by any research methods, but when using them at Focus Groups you can hear what each participant discuss about what they think is the best answer, and you can perceive attitudes, feelings, from them.

• What assumptions about the nature of knowledge (epistemology) seem to be associated with this approach?

In the knowledge definition there are 4 assumptions of the nature of knowledge which are the belief, the truth, the justification and the Justified true belief knowledge. For the focus group approach, the knowledge participants talk about is the belief, in which personally they answer what they believe is the truth but are not required to present justification to define whether what they answered is true or not.
The interaction between participants highlights their view of the world, the language they use about an issue and their values and beliefs about a situation. (Kitzinger, 1994)

• What kinds of ethical issues arise?

The most important ethical considerations are that when involving participants, the researcher must give the full information about the purpose and uses of participants’ contributions. Researcher must be careful on handling of sensitive material and confidentiality given that there will always be more than one participant in the group. Every participant should share and respect the confidentiality of what they hear during the meeting.

• What would "validity" imply in a project that used this approach?

Focus groups can help to explore or generate hypotheses, develop questions or concepts, but they are limited because the findings cannot be generalized to a whole population because it usually is a small number of people participating and the sample is not representative.
Usually this method can be used at the preliminary or exploratory stages of a study, it can be used as a method in its own or as a complement to other methods for validity checking.  

• What are some of the practical or ethical issues that would need to be considered?

The most important ethical issues are that the researcher should advise the participants the purpose of the focus group, and let them know they might be sharing their information with other participants at the same group.

• Two published articles that have used this approach.

As said before, this method is used at the first stages of a study, to evaluate or develop a particular program of activities, or after program has been completed, to assess its impact or to generate further avenues of research. (Gibbs, 1997)
An example of the use of focus groups is the study named: “Using focus groups to develop HIV education among adolescent females in Zimbabwe” (Munodawafa D., Gwede C., Mubayira C. , 1995)
In this study, the researchers developed focus groups with 78 girls from Zimbabwe to assess need for HIV/AIDS prevention and education. This research helped to develop ideas for future efforts in developing comprehensive AIDS prevention and education programs to target adolescent and adult males.
As said before we might notice that with the discussion at the mentioned focus groups, the researchers are able to develop the need of prevention education, identifying who needs it and in which specific subjects. Otherwise, we can see how the discussion guides to conclusions joining different perspectives. The ethical issues are also shown since girls that participate share what they know, and what they had experienced towards this topic.
Also, the AIDS Media Research Project (Kitzinger J. , 1994) used the focus group method to explore how media messages are processed by audiences and how understandings of AIDS are constructed. In this study, they conducted a total of 52 different discussions, with 351 participants. These discussions had a peculiarity, since they used pre-existing groups the discussion was easier and with deeper information, which gave an advantage to what the researcher obtained. This study was completed through survey information, in which they got the general information and through the focus groups they look to gather more details.
In my opinion, focus groups are a good first approach when developing a study or program. Having the opportunity to talk to people working or experiencing your question gives you a very near understanding of the specific issue.
​
Bibliography FREITAS (H.), OLIVEIRA (M.), JENKINS (M.), and POPJOY (O.). (1998). The Focus Group, a qualitative research method. ISRC, Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore, 22.
Gibbs, A. (1997). Focus Groups. Department of Sociology, University of Surrey.
Kitzinger, J. (1994). The methodology of focus groups: the importance of interaction between research participants. Sociology of Health, 103-121.
Kitzinger, J. (1994). The methodology of Focus Groups: the importance of interaction between research participants. Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. 16 No. 1, 105-121.
Munodawafa D., Gwede C., Mubayira C. . (1995). Using focus groups to develop HIV education among adolescent females in Zimbabwe. Health Promotion 10 (2), 85-92.
 
 
 
 

A Focus Group is a type of in-depth interview accomplished in a group, whose meetings present characteristics defined with respect to the proposal, size, composition, and interview procedures. (FREITAS (H.), OLIVEIRA (M.), JENKINS (M.), and POPJOY (O.)., 1998). The use of focus groups carries advantages and disadvantages that could affect the qualitative research results.
​
To better understand how this qualitative research method is used, we analyzed a case study named: “Studying internationalization on campus” held by students from the University of Western Australia. In this case study, had the commitment to discover if the internationalization experiences a student lives by studying abroad, provides a similar benefit to the students in campus that interact with the foreign student.
With the aim of obtaining well-founded results, students designed a research project utilizing both focus groups and one-on-one interviews. These findings helped mitigate some disadvantages from both interviews and focus groups might present such as trying to generalize an observation by an interviewed response, or not giving voice to a particular group of people at a focus group.
At this project, students had to design and find the suitable questions to be used at the focus group and at the interview. The goal of a focus group is to generate discussion between the participants to get to know different perspectives, evaluate different ideas and develop new insights for which you need certain questions which encourage group dialog rather than individual responses. Unlike when you do an interview where what you’re looking for is to hear from the individual experiences.
As mentioned before, this research was held by students through two different methods, interview and focus group. As explained before, interviews to different actors have specific answers and conclusions from the interviewee. Meanwhile, focus group generate discussed conclusions in which all participants agree and participated with more openness than by itself. The example shown at the study case, refers to a conclusion that everyone by itself had about why local students didn’t engage with international students. At the interviews everyone blamed local students for their lack of interest. Otherwise at the focus group, they concluded why local students had lack of interest, a more helpful answer since gives you a root cause of the problem and specific action plans that can be developed.
Key findings from the focus group questions are encompassed in these three main themes:

1. International students often declared that they felt alone and had big issues on understanding cultural and social norms.
2. International students felt contradictions between what they were told what the benefits of participating in an international program are and what they really were experiencing.
3. Limited time they had to make the research.
4. Lack of relationships to have enough international students invited.
5. Lack of validity by getting conclusions with just 1 interview and 1 focus group.

 
As mentioned before, one of the key findings the students doing the research had, were that recruitment wasn’t as easy as they thought. They found out people is not willing to help on focus groups or activities in which they need to put effort on. Students underestimated the process that needs to be done to get a group of people big and committed enough to have a good research finished. In this case, students concluded that personal engagement and reminders where the best way to get a good focus group.
In conclusion, focus groups are a good qualitative research method which help researchers find out conclusions and ideas to implement further actions. When holding a focus group, a researcher should have: a very well-defined goal, with specific questions that propitiate discussion and look for conclusions from the participants and establish a well-done process to have a successful recruitment.

BibliographyFREITAS (H.), OLIVEIRA (M.), JENKINS (M.), and POPJOY (O.). (1998). The Focus Group, a qualitative research method. ISRC, Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore, 22.
McKenzie, L & Baldassar, L 2017. 'Studying internationalization on campus: lessons from an undergraduate qualitative research project' [online]. SAGE Research Methods cases. https://methods.sagepub.com/case/srmpromo/KZsIeF/studying-internationalization-campus-undergraduate-qualitative-research

I am the national student affairs director for the university I work at. In this position I am responsible for designing the key elements that students should experience during their undergraduate studies. The student affairs team is conformed by the coordinators, who work directly with students, the national coordinator who supervise what is done on all campuses and me who design and look for new ideas to interest students.

I chose ethnography method since I will like to understand our students’ generation, how they think, and why they act as they act. With ethnography the basic idea is to share time with them, learn from them and observe to find answers to the question.

My basic question for this short research will be: What is the motivation of undergraduate students?
I decided to sit and walk where most of the students are regularly between classes and after school, to hear what they are talking about and if I can, talk with them about what they are thinking.
I am 27, and the students should be around 18 to 20 years old, I thought I didn’t look that old, so maybe they might trust on me to share what they think.

I tried this exercise for 2 days only. The first day, I was alone looking at everyone and everyone stopped chatting and stared at me as if I was a stranger, I think I was. They talked to each other, but they didn’t let me hear that much about what they were talking about. Girls often speak a bit louder and talk a lot about what school, places to visit in the weekend, boys, things they want to buy.

For the next day, I looked for an undergraduate student that I knew, so she could help me meet and talk to more students. So, I was with her and approached to a group of girls. I had to tell them that I was observing and they accepted, but I am sure they didn't talk all that they wanted. I could hear a bit more about what they liked and what they didn’t like about school, about homework, where they wanted to go in the weekend.

After two days of observation I am very curious and would like to keep hearing and understanding them more. I think I will try to be friends with them, and invite them to design with me some activities to understand more what they think and what they like. 
​
Haz clic aquí para editar.

I just enrolled myself in a new course at EDx named: Introduction to Social Research Methods. 

As part of my course I will be blogging about what I get to learn each week. I know very few about social research methods. I made my Master degree in Business Administration with a focus on Quality and Productivity, in my masters I had the opportunity to use more engineering research methods based on experiments.

I'm interested in this course because I have 2 years working for an education institution in Mexico and we've been dealing with knowing the best way to evaluate if our interventions with students are successful and accomplishing our mission or not.

The topics I will be assessing are: education research focused on intervention success. With this topic my initial questions are: Is our intervention needed? Is our intervention achieving what our hypothesis raises? Is anything else we could make to achieve our mission eliminating some variables?
In my opinion, and with the evaluation I made on the 1st week of the course I think well assessed qualitative methods with focus groups and ethnographic approach will be helpful for my objective.

In the past, I have used focus groups methods to gather qualitative information, but I’ve never used ethnographic methods for which I have bit more doubts.
In my opinion, the most important challenges I might face are time and resources required to establish a well-done research to find what we’re looking for but I know that a well assessed research will help on our findings and questions.

Since I am interested in education research methods, and because I am sure that many classmates are very ahead on research methods knowledge, I will begin to read the Research Methods and Methodologies in Education book proposed for the course.

I am wondering if there is any other classmate or person that will like to join on this journey to learn about social research methods.

​Please comment if you’re interested 😊
See you on the next one!