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On framing, the value of narrative and storytelling in scholarly research, and the importance of asking the “what is this a story of” question

Much of what I do here on my blog, when I teach courses and workshops on academic research and writing, and with my own students and thesis writers is help them frame their research, “sell their ideas”, and create a narrative that showcases their innovative approach to their research.

Last year, in October I visited the University of Bath to present a paper in progress on global water summits. After my talk, I had a chance to go for a walk around Bath with my dear friends Yixian Sun, Michael J. Bloomfield, and Alex De Coss Corzo. Alex and I were walking down the hill right in front of the Sham Castle when I clearly remember him helping me reframe my recently presented paper by asking the simple question “what is this a story of?” Alex’s query literally made me stop in my tracks and think how powerful this simple yet profound interrogation was. What story can my research tell? What am I trying to communicate to the audience? Which insights am I finding that make my research worth listening to and reading?

Thus I wanted to write a Twitter thread (to then make it into this blog pos) on framing, the value of narrative and storytelling in scholarly research, and the importance of asking the “what is this a story of” question that Anselm Strauss always asked from his students.

The “what is this a story of” question helps us more accurately frame our research.

Central Panel of the Storytelling Panel

Photo credit: Nancy White on Flickr, CC A-ND.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we teach research design, and research methods and methodology, particularly because I find that when everything is said and done in our research project, we may find ourselves scratching our heads and thinking “ok, I did this, what now?”

Making sense of a large project is always incredibly hard. I have experienced this with my three theses (undergraduate, Masters and PhD), and with several projects I’ve undertaken, as well as with two books I am trying desperately to finish this year.

“What is this a story of?”

Let me give you a few examples from a few fantastic books I have read.

In their 2020 book “Votes, Drugs and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico”, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley deploy a mixed methods approach to tell a story of why violence rose through organized drug trafficking organizations during the process of democratization in Mexico. The story that Trejo and Ley tell is that electoral politics has emerged as a major driver of criminal violence. Their work extends other theoretical and empirical work, and tells a different story to what we are told. Telling a story that extends other works IS a contribution.

Another example, from Eduardo Moncada’s 2021 “Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America”. In his book, Moncada offers an analytical account of how different groups resist extortion through acts of everyday resistance, rather than engaging in direct violence, what he calls “the coproduction of order”. The story that Moncada offers (backed up by extensive fieldwork and data analysis, like the Trejo and Ley book) is one where his work offers a counter-intuitive example of resistance, and explains how and why these strategies emerge. It’s a story of non-violent survival.

Both books tell stories about criminal violence, backed by rigorous analyses and in-depth field research. These stories offer answers to questions that puzzle us.

Storytelling is important when we write a research paper, when we write a book or a dissertation or a thesis: “what is the story we are trying to tell” and “what is this a story of”, are the two questions Strauss would ask.

I liked this paper by Clarke and Star on Strauss and his approach to mentoring students. Knowing the story we are trying to tell is why I always ask my students and my thesis advisees: “what is this a story of? what does your work tell me that I would not have figured out by myself?”

In my view, research is about telling a story. With data, with theory, but it’s a story in the end.

We reveal things.

We explain concepts.

We make the complex legible.

Storytelling is an underrated skill in academic writing and scholarly research and I do hope that these reflections can be helpful to others trying to frame and make sense of their research.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 3, 2023

The Abstract Decomposition Matrix Technique to find a gap in the literature

I have been thinking about how I can help my students with their theses, particularly because our programs are rather compressed and they need to get a lot done in a very short period of time. I’ve been working on developing a strategy to discern “the gap in the literature” that I plan to test with Masters and undergraduate students. Possibly also with PhD students.

I have developed several strategies to teach how to craft a good research question, how to find the gap in the literature. But when I had a meeting with Masters students recently and I taught them how to use some of my methods, they seem a little bit confused as to how to choose what exactly they should study.

Let me begin by saying what I told them at the beginning:

YOU NEED TO READ. A LOT.

I understand that doing literature reviews is challenging (I have an entire section in my blog with multiple strategies to tackle the process of reviewing the literature). But if we are in the world of academia to contribute to our fields, we really need to read A LOT, because otherwise we may end up claiming that we have done something new that has already been published elsewhere (or in another language).

Literature review

But I always try to help them by asking them to focus their search and their research on 4 elements:

We conduct a review of the literature in order to develop one or more of these elements:

1) what has been done before, what has been studied and how it has been analyzed,
2) the foundations upon which our own work can be developed further,
3) any spaces where we can embed our own contributions, and/or
4) a map of themes showing connections between different topics, ideas, concepts, authors, etc.

When I teach strategies to systematize the literature, I usually tell them to use my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED, or Excel Dump in short).

As they read each article/chapter/book chapter/book, they drop their notes into their Excel Dump.

Excel dump LaVanchy et al

An Excel Dump row describing an article on Nicaragua’s water governance.

But when my students asked me “how do I ensure that I am tackling a DIFFERENT research question to the one others have worked on?” I had to pause. This is a valid question, and I thought about how they could do this in an easy, and visually appealing way.

So this is what I did: I developed an Abstract Decomposition Matrix.

Both Dr. Jessica Calarco and I use a very similar method to craft abstracts (using 5 elements, or asking 5 different questions). So I used one of her own articles and decomposed her abstract with an Excel template I developed.

5 questions abstract decomposed

Even if I haven’t yet fully read the literature, or don’t work in the field (I don’t, I study entirely different things to Dr. Calarco), I can start imagining extensions of her work, different methods, other case studies/countries/populations/types of schools.

DOING THIS ABSTRACT DECOMPOSITION EXERCISE HELPS ME THINK OF NEW DIRECTIONS FOR MY OWN RESEARCH.

Now, does this abstract decomposing strategy work in other fields? I applied the strategy to this paper. While I had to “fill out” some of the details of the 5 elements framework, it does give me clarity on potential avenues for further work.

5 questions abstract decomposed 2

I did this for a third paper, and the strategy seems to hold relatively well.

5 questions abstract decomposed 3

Thus, what I am planning to do with my students is to ask them to survey the literature and decompose abstracts of articles they read so they can see what’s been done. Once their Abstract Decomposition Matrix is complete, they can see where they can focus their work.

Reading highlighted papers

This exercise does NOT substitute my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED), but I believe it complements it. You can do an Abstract Decomposition Matrix exercise with, say, 10-15 articles, and from there, you can triage and decide which ones you will read in more detail. Although I have NOT yet tested this strategy with my students. I plan to do so this summer and fall, and will report back. I am confident it will be helpful.

Before anybody asks: yes, in this particular 5 elements abstract decomposition strategy I use the authors’ exact words. My Excel Dump technique asks of the reader to use their own words in the notes. What I noticed as I was filling out one of the ADM templates is that sometimes you will need to use your own words to fill in the gaps. I think this is good.

In the meantime if you are teaching how to review the literature for your students, this is how I conducted one in an entirely new-to-me method (hospital ethnography). These two posts (from reading a lot to writing paragraphs of your literature review and mapping a new field of research) may also be helpful, particularly if you’re delving into entirely new fields/areas/methods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 30, 2023

16 tips on the process of academic writing and publishing from the #ISA2023 Environmental Studies Section Speed Mentoring Session

I sat on the “Writing and Publishing” table at the Environmental Studies Section Speed Mentoring Roundtable during the 2023 meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Montreal (Canada).

ESS Speed Mentoring

Photo credit:Lily Hsueh.

My co-panelist was my coauthor and dear friend Dr. Kate O’Neill, so we agreed to talk about the process of academic writing and publishing from our perspectives as authors and editors of books, articles, chapters and journals.

Here are a few pieces of advice we both shared that will be useful for all.

1) don’t take desk rejects personally

2) review as you’d like to be reviewed

3) as much as possible, if you get a revise-and-resubmit (R&R), drop everything and work on it and return it to the editors (my full process for working on a Revise-And-Resubmit can be found here).

4) peer reviewed journal articles are still the currency of academia – focus on those (book chapters rock but it will be hard to sell those for tenure)

5) remember to create a pipeline of work — don’t try to publish everything all at once.

6) if you are working on converting your dissertation into a book I very strongly recommend Dr. William M. Germano’s “From Dissertation To Book”.

7) remember that what you publish depends on your needs and evaluation

8) make sure that your work is LEGIBLE to the communities you want to dialogue with: your readership, your PhD committee, your tenure committee, your discipline/field.

9) while a lot of people pay lip service to interdisciplinarity, we often get evaluated on disciplinary terms.

10) when asked to review remember that usually 3 reviewers are needed per each journal article – so you may need to review just as many per paper you have under review.

11) remember that you don’t necessarily need to address every reviewer’s comment – you can pick and choose.

12) don’t take bad reviews personally (I often ask dear friends to summarize feedback for me because it’s painful).

13) read the literature broadly, deeply, ENGAGE with it, don’t just do the token citation. Make sure you engage in citational justice & your citations are diverse.

14) creating a pipeline of work is important during graduate school and afterwards

15) remember that writing (and publishing) is a social activity – find writing buddies, read each other’s drafts, support and encourage each other, provide kind feedback, join writing groups.

16) book time with yourself to write and prioritize it.

My blog has plenty of resources on publishing and writing strategies that may be useful to you all at #ISA2023

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 19, 2023

Producing journal article manuscripts from a doctoral dissertation

A good friend of mine who recently completed her doctoral dissertation asked me recently in a quick one-on-one consultation how she could go about converting her doctoral dissertation into articles.

I suggested a process that I will share now. Though a number of doctoral candidates are required by their programs to publish articles out of their dissertation or to build it as a series of articles, others ask for more of a book-manuscript-style thesis.

My own doctoral students write their dissertations as a series of three stand-alone-but-interconnected papers that can be converted into journal articles, either during their graduate program, or afterwards. They follow my DAT model to craft their written outputs.

Now, let’s be real: it’s December 4th, we all need a break, and it would be a good idea to use these three journal articles as the backbone to plan a year worth’s of work. Wendy Belcher’s #12WeeksArticle book offers a step-by-step process for writing a paper/revising in 12 weeks. What I suggested was to follow Belcher’s approach (assign 12 weeks to revising or rewriting a paper). Belcher’s #12WeeksArticle book’s 2nd edition focuses on writing a paper from scratch in 12 weeks. The first edition focuses on revising in 12 weeks. You can choose either model.

So that means that if we consider 12 weeks for revising each journal article with a good holiday in December, you can start with the first article by say, January 15th 2023 and use 12 weeks for each (and a week’s rest in between). This means that by the end of October of 2023 you may have submitted 3 papers to be peer reviewed and published as journal articles (including 3 weeks where you take a break). This, to me, seems like a fantastic level of productivity.

Now, let’s be realistic: this is a one year plan for getting three journal articles out. What happened to me a few years back was that I got THREE revise-and-resubmits within the same year, and it was next to impossible to convert them all. So you need to account for this.

Hopefully this process (which I devised in December 2022!) can help some or many of you extract publishable journal articles off your doctoral dissertation.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 13, 2023

5 habit-forming, practice-developing strategies that you can work with during the upcoming month

I wrote the thread that originated this blog post on October 1st, 2022. I had not been able to blog for many reasons, one of the key ones was that I did not have time to blog.

Most of the time, I plan my entire month by the end of the previous one. I did not have the time (literally!) to do so, therefore had to spend some time doing so when I wrote the thread, at the beginning of October 2022.

Beginnings of months tend to be good times to start new habits. This blog post details a few practices that you might feasibly start within the next month, without pushing yourself too much, perhaps.

Writing at the h

1) Starting (or renewing) your writing practice.

Whenever I teach academic writing, I tell my students that we need to aim for small, reasonable, attainable goals. Write for 15 minutes, write 50 words. Something tangible. This micro-goal-setting method helps me strengthen my own writing practice, or restart it when I’ve been away from my work for too long.

Just get some words down.

2) Starting (or upgrading) your To-Do-List practice.

For me, having a To-Do List is fundamental. But I need said To-Do List to be reasonable. To do that, I break down the work I have to finish in smaller pieces, which I tackle each one separately. Breaking down the work in “work aliquots” allow me to really plan according to my energy, time and health.

3) Upgrading your self-care practice.

As most of you know, I spent three months this summer with COVID, COVID sequelae, and pneumonia. Almost dying really made me rethink my practices. I’ve committed to prioritizing myself above EVERYTHING ELSE. I have upgraded my self-care practice, I hope you can do so, too.

4) Upgrading (or starting!) a reading practice.

READING IS WRITING.

We don’t HAVE time to read. We MAKE time to read.

The link above offers 8 strategies that might help you develop your own reading practice (we are all different and teaching loads can be insane).

5) Developing a planning and project management practice that works FOR YOU:

What works for me is to plan my entire year and then do monthly, weekly and even sometimes daily adjustments. I also need redundancies (digital + analog). The link above shows you how I plan across multiple timelines.

Writing

I wrote the Twitter thread that originated this blog post in hopes it would help other overwhelmed scholars. Hopefully it will work for you too.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 19, 2023

On calendars, synchronization and collaborative work in academia: Aligning Priorities and Availabilities across multiple people

There’s been a lot of discussion on Twitter over the past few days now from academics and tech people about calendars, synchronization and collaborative work, and I really don’t have the time to read them all but I wante to put in my two cents, so here it goes. In a previous life (I started working at a VERY young age and we won’t discuss child labor issues on here), I managed both my parents’ offices (they were lawyers). I wanted to gain administrative and management experience, in case, you know, I needed to find work to feed myself.

What I learned from managing my parents’ offices was that EVERYONE believes their issues are OF THE HIGHEST PRIORITY. So, I had to manage my parents’ schedule (which also had, you know, the personal life component) in a way that they had protected time for doing The Actual Work.

Monthly calendar

Negotiating calendars (specifically, appointments) is about negotiating PRIORITIES and AVAILABILITIES across multiple people. The problem is not whether or not you do “time-blocking” (blocking off time to ensure that you get work done). It’s that priorities shift even within the same day/hour.

Monthly calendar revisionAn example: this week, Mexico City has had several earthquakes. People evacuate, aided by a seismic alarm. During the period within which people evacuate their buildings and have to wait until they see if things are ok, their priority is knowing if their loved ones are safe.

Priorities shift, all the time, and that’s not unique to academia. They shift in our personal lives, etc. This summer I spent THREE MONTHS sick with COVID, COVID sequelae and pneumonia. Was my work or academia itself a priority? NOT AT ALL. My priority was to get healthy again. Yes, I have time blocked for my writing (see photo). And most of the time, I DO use it for research (reading, writing, thinking, reflecting). But sometimes I have to re-prioritize this time because I have more urgent things to finish.

Priorities are not monolithic.

Calendar with written time blocks

What *I* have found most useful whenever I have to negotiate meetings (and this does NOT mean in any way, shape or form that you must follow my strategy) is to socialize what my priorities are.

This quarter, my priorities are:
1) preparing well and teaching my two courses.
2) finishing outstanding writing commitments I have (including the very few peer reviews I accepted)
3) maintain my health

Everything else needs to be negotiated and renegotiated all the time. But I verbalize and share my priorities and my availabilities, ALL THE TIME.

For this to work, everyone needs to socialize their priorities and availabilities. A few friends of mine LOVE meetings in the morning. The morning is my best time for thinking and writing. But I compromise: if there is no other time for a meeting, I’ll move my writing elsewhere. I have several students about to finish their theses and defend them. Their degree completion becomes a higher-rank priority for me, so I make myself available at times that I probably would prefer to be writing, because they NEED to graduate, so again, I compromise. What I find important and useful and productive is that at all points, everyone involved in compromising and readjusting Priorities and Availabilities feels that the process is fair.

If I’m the only one compromising, I feel taken advantage of.

Calendar synchronization is a coordination problem, and this is precisely my area of scholarly specialization (coordination, collaboration and cooperation). What I find useful in achieving optimal results in coordination problems is clear communication and well-established rules.

Bottom line: how you negotiate your calendar is for you to decide, but it’s probably good to remember that Priorities and Availabilities are hard to align, and that if you want to make sure they do, you’ll need clear communication and well-established negotiation rules.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 25, 2022

On writing by hand and always keeping a written record of everything

Transcribing handwritten notes into the Everything Notebook Last week, I attended the 2022 Discards Studies Conference: Exploring Disposal’s Past, Present, and Future in New York City. As a scholar of waste, wastewater and discards, this was a really key conference for me to attend. This was also my first conference after 3 months of COVID, COVID sequelae and pneumonia. Though I am (and at the time, was) feeling incredibly healthy, I did not want to over-stress my body. So, I left my Everything Notebook back home and only took my ultra-light laptop. My laptop has a problem with the battery, so it does not recognise it. This means that it needs to ALWAYS be connected to power. Turns out the room where we were did not have power outlets everywhere. Guess what I was unable to do?

Yes: TAKE NOTES.

Normally, I would have taken notes by hand in my Everything Notebook (or even pieces of paper from hotel parafernalia). I was staying literally two blocks from a stationery store. I am, like anybody who follows me knows, a stationery storer.

But I decided to do a little experiment: NO NOTES THIS TIME. Just pay attention. I would simply pay attention to the speaker(s) without writing any notes.

I did take numerous photos and live-tweeted bits and pieces that I thought were useful. Those are my written records of what happened in the conference. HOWEVER… my brilliant ideas, those that came through the interactions with speakers, when thinking about my own work and how it related to any particular presenter, THOSE ARE GONE.

I did NOT keep a written record of what I was thinking (I could have done it in the Notes app of my iPhone, but my brain doesn’t work so). I am hoping that the organizers kept the recordings of the live-stream (it was a seamlessly hybrid, COVID-safe event), because that way I am sure I can go back and check what the presenters said.

But that’s twice the investment in time.

Truth be told, I should have brought a pocket-sized notebook. I have plenty of those. I even have a few that are so tiny that they can fit in my shirt’s pockets.

But the experiment of JUST paying attention to the talks without recording my own thoughts or specific great ideas I heard was useful, to an extent. I now understand a bit better those students of mine who don’t take notes in my classes.

But for me, I don’t work that way. I need to keep a handwritten record of what we discussed. That’s just how my brain works and that’s NOT going to change.

Moving forward, I’ll do one of two things:

Either

1) I take my Everything Notebook with me,

or

2) I take a pocket-sized notebook with me, and then transcribe my notes to my Everything Notebook.

I will always and forever need handwritten notes, it’s very clear to me now.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 25, 2022

Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (my reading notes)

Qualitative LiteracyI had been waiting to get my hands on this book by Mario Luis Small and
Jessica Calarco for a very long while, as I was on Twitter while Jess was writing it and witnessed the conversations on here about it. I finally received my copy this week, so I decided to write a few reading notes about the book. There are several elements I like about Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research and obviously (I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t), a number of quibbles. Overall, I like the book and I appreciate the criteria that Small and Calarco set forth to consider when examining research projects where the data acquisition methods are ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. I particularly liked their honesty in explaining exactly what their book is and isn’t.

Evaluation is complicated because it requires setting specific standards and comparing against those standards and verifying whether the evaluated item complies (or not) with those standards. Evaluating qualitative research is very complicated, for many reasons, as my notes here will show. it is always hard to write about evaluation of qualitative research, precisely because of the complexity of developing and setting those standards and then undertaking the empirical work to evaluate said standards (yes, it feels like evaluation-inception, but so it is!).

What I like most about Small and Calarco’s book is that they don’t actually set standards against which to compare and tick boxes or determine compliance ranges through some sort of Likert scale. Their work develops 5 characteristics of “well-done” qualitative research. I used quotation marks for a very specific reason. Small and Calarco do NOT say that the characteristics they use to evaluate ethnographic and interview research are the only ones. So, they are also NOT implying that there are specific standards for solid research. But they do mply that, on average (and on the whole), most research that we (the community of scholars and practitioners who use and consume QR, collectively) would be able to see as “good” qualitative research, share these characteristics. I commend Small and Calarco for this honesty.

Small and Calarco are also VERY clear that their book is on criteria for users and consumers of qualitative research that they can use to conduct an assessment of TWO qualitative DATA ACQUISITION PROCESSES. Evaluating qualitative analyses, qualitative research designs and a whole other set of elements of QR would take, as they aptly say, a whole lot of additional books.

The way I see Small and Calarco’s “Qualitative Literacy” is very much the way I see Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles (which are very widely misunderstood, and I have to frequently clarify their use and meaning): as observed empirical regularities of systems/processes. Small and Calarco say (not an exact quotation, but my interpretation of their book) that “these are the characteristics that various types of ethnographic and interview research projects/processes share. We believe these, on average/on the whole, represent solid examples of well-conducted data acquisition processes”.

Evaluating qualitative research as a whole (from research design to implementation to analysis to write-up) is always complicated, so I really appreciate and value Small and Calarco’s contribution to building this knowledge base for additional, future projects. Overall, I liked Small and Calarco’s “Qualitative Literacy”, as someone who teaches, supervises, conducts and evaluates qualitative research projects.

10/10 recommend.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 22, 2022

On the importance of networks in graduate school and beyond (and the challenges of switching disciplines and fields)

NetworksBy all measures, I’m pretty well networked now. I have a globally popular blog and Twitter account (follow me there if you want, @raulpacheco). People from all over the world read my blog, regularly use my resources in their teaching and their own teaching, and I have solid networks across multiple fields and disciplines (political science, human geography, public policy, public administration, qualitative methods, mixed methods).

It wasn’t always like this, and I wanted to write about this, because my current situation (extremely well networked) was far from what I experienced as a graduate student. I woke up this morning (September 4th, 2022) pondering about the role and value of networks in graduate school and post-PhD, and how I did not have “the correct networks” leading to my studying a Masters and a PhD.

I studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate. From that vantage point, I knew more or less where to go if I wanted to do a Masters (Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya, of course) leading to a PhD. The Tec de Celaya’s chemical engineering department is top-notch, and at the time I was finishing my undergraduate, ALL faculty members were Mexicans with foreign PhDs. I had met several of them through events I organized as a student (I brought them to my university to speak), so I knew that if I wanted to do my PhD in process control, I would have to go to University of Wisconsin Madison (where Arturo Jimenez did his PhD).

I switched fields for my Masters (economics of technical change), and for my PhD (human geography and political science). This meant that I had ZERO networks in any of the 3 fields. I joined programmes literally walking in without knowing anyone and very little about the actual disciplines I was about to study. Moving from natural sciences and engineering to economics was a shocker, but entering political science and human geography absolutely shattered my understanding of the world and how I was supposed to study phenomena. They’re different! In chemical engineering I knew what I needed to do to analyze a chemical reaction. I had blueprints, equations to analyze distillation towers, design chemical plants. In political science, human geography and economics, analysis meant something entirely different.

Paper, pen, HP TouchPad, coffee, scone. All important tools of the trade #academia

No networks, no tools either.

So, for my Masters and PhD, not only did I not have the right networks, I didn’t have the right tools either. I entered completely unrelated fields and had to be fully retrained to understand description, analysis and many other concepts in an entirely different way.

THIS IS HARD

So when I see a social scientist (say a political science PhD) who did an undergraduate degree in political science, followed up by a Masters AND a PhD in the same discipline and sometimes even the same field, I immediately think “you moved within the same discipline, the challenges you faced are completely different from those crossing disciplines in such a stark way”.

Certainly, my knowledge of chemical engineering and economics enhances what I study and shapes how I conduct research as a political scientist and human geographer, but I say this now as a tenured, senior professor with a pretty decent publishing career.

As a graduate student, I was TERRIFIED.

So, my experience also colors my approach to mentoring and teaching students, and makes me more inclined to continue writing my blog and sharing resources others may need. Because God knows I sure needed them, didn’t have them during graduate school!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 4, 2022

A partial, commented bibliography on focus groups

I have taught qualitative methods and written about them for a very long while, and I frequently feel like there’s a substantive misunderstanding of what a focus group is. It’s not a “collective interview”, nor “a way to save time and money on interview because we have them all in one place”. The focus group explicitly looks at the relationships WITHIN and interactions among the members of the group.

Focus Group

Focus group. Credit: Dave Shea on Flickr. CC BY 2.0

What is a focus group? I really enjoyed how Dr. Jennifer Cyr (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella) describes the portrayal of focus groups in multiple media (television, print materials):

“Focus groups bring individuals together to discuss a set of questions. These conversations typically take place around a table, and they include a moderator who guides and nurtures the discussion.”

Cyr, Jennifer. 2019. Focus Groups for the Social Science Researcher Methods for Social Inquiry. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, New Delhi, Singapore: Cambridge University Press, p. 1.

Dr. Cyr refers to David L. Morgan’s definition of focus groups as:

“… a research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic determind by the researcher. This definition has three essential components. First, it clearly states that focus groups are a research method devoted to data collection. Second, it locates the interaction in a group discussion as the source of the data. Third, it acknowledges the researcher’s active role in creating the group discussion for data collection purposes” (Morgan 1996, p. 130)

.
Morgan, David L. 1996. “Focus Groups.” Annual Review of Sociology 22(August 1996): 129–152.

I have this nagging feeling that the relational nature of a focus group gets lost in how we teach focus as part of a suite of qualitative methods. I may be wrong, but it’s what I perceive from how some scholars report their use of focus groups in research. And from the replies to my Twitter thread, it looks like I am not wrong.

So, what if you DO want to compare how individual interviews would perform against focus groups? Well, my dear friend Dr. Amber Wutich (Arizona State University) and her collaborators have just the perfect paper for you: Wutich, Amber et al. 2010. “Comparing Focus Group and Individual Responses on Sensitive Topics: A Study of Water Decision Makers in a Desert City.” Field Methods 22(1): 88–110.

If you want to delve deeper into focus groups as a qualitative research method you can peruse my partial, commented bibliography on the topic. (Click on the hyperlink to go to the PDF file).

Hope this post and the partial, commented bibliography I compiled help those looking for some guidance on how to design and implement focus groups as a qualitative data gathering technique.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 28, 2022