Focus Groups

Intention:
At sort-of the midway point of my project, I realised that I needed some kind of sense check or touchpoint to hear from students on what they thinking about these notions of community and/or belonging with the context of their academic experience. The interventions had been a useful way to test out some of my ideas around group work, the studio and its role in building community. However, overwhelmingly it felt as though the next logical step would be to design a focus group/working group to continue to articulate some of these ideas with the students voices being fore-fronted.

Considerations:
I thought it would be good idea to include students from the first and third years. Part of the reason is that these are the two years I teach on so I already have an existing connection with the students. Another part of the reason was that it would help include perspectives from the beginning and end of the student journey – to consider where things started and how they ended up.

Both Wilson (1997) and Kitzinger (1994) emphasise the value of interaction between participants, to bring shared memory and collective experience to the fore. This is a key factor in differentiating focus groups from group interviews (Morgan, 1988 as cited in Wilson, 1997). Through my earlier reflections, I’ve also been considering this idea of the shared experience of cohorts and perhaps this could be a way to create a space to bring some of that knowledge into conversation.

Design:
I decided to conduct two focus groups with two sessions each for Year 1 and Year 3.
Dates for Year 1: 29th November + 6th December
Dates for Year 3: 9th December +10th December
Duration: 2 hours per session
Number of Participants: 3-5. Note* I advertised the focus groups as open to about 20. However, this was to be mindful of the fact that it was close to submission periods and the Christmas break. So I expected a natural fall-off based on previous experiences. In the end I had an average of 3-5 participants in each session (including myself).

Each focus group was designed with tailored questions to reflect the distinct experiences of first-year and final-year students. For Year 1, questions focused on expectations and early experiences of community, while Year 3 questions encouraged reflection on the evolution of friendships and the impact of community over time.

Note*I would like to acknowledge my use of OpenAI Chat GPT in helping structure the questions for my focus groups. I used the AI to help brainstorm some ideas and refine the questions for my focus group.

In general, I think the prompts generated with the AI were quite useful and pretty much on the point in terms of where I wanted to take these conversations. I only had to modify a couple of them and make slight changes to the questions. See below for the final set of focus group questions:

The sessions were hosted on Miro, allowing students to share their responses collectively through a brainstorming activity (see below). For each question, students added their thoughts to a shared board, creating a visual representation of their ideas. Afterward, we discussed some of the more personal responses as a group. I’d like to believe that this helped facilitate participation and gave students a tangible way to see the diversity and commonality of their experiences. To foster a comfortable environment, I often shared my own experiences as a student, creating a sense of relatability and encouraging openness. Wilson (1997) highlights that a non-threatening atmosphere encourages self-disclosure, which was particularly important given the personal nature of the topics discussed.

Getting Students/Advertising the session:
I set up a sign up on Moodle with all the relevant information. See example below:

However, getting students to sign up was actually tougher than I anticipated (owing to it being close to the submission and holiday period). I adopted three main strategies and with much effort was able to create 2 focus groups.

1. Email: I sent out to big emails and also requested the year leads for Years 1 and 3 to include it in their weekly newsletters that go out to the year groups every Friday. My colleagues were extremely supportive of my project (thanks Maria and Craig!) and through this I was able to catch a few students.
2. I also went around the four Year 1 studios to tell the students more about the project – an opportunity to be part of research.
3. As a final resort, I approached students I had taught previously and thus built a relationship with. I am aware this comes with its own biases but it helped me get the last few I needed to round out the groups.

Introducing a Participatory element:
Session 2 (Activity 2 and 3) for each of the focus groups was about analysing the data generated in the first session. Even though we were made well aware that we are conducting Action Research and not Participatory Action Research, we were constantly encouraged by our tutors to consider the implications of a participatory element – which I thought was really nice. So for the second session, the focus group turned into a bit of a working group where we collectively looked at what was generated in the first session and then started to organise it under certain categories and themes. The format was kept consistent for this session across both year groups.

Ethical and Practical Considerations:
Both Wilson (1997) and Kitzinger (1994) stress the importance of ethical considerations when dealing with potentially sensitive topics. I designed a degree of anonymity within the Miro activity and emphasised that participants could pass on any questions they felt uncomfortable answering. Additionally, I tried my best to remain mindful of power dynamics—particularly with first-year students who might feel hesitant to speak openly. In retrospect, I perhaps could have upheld a higher degree of anonymity. Even though the responses on Miro aren’t necessarily tagged to a particular name, if one really wanted to find out who wrote something, they could go through the recording and attempt to decipher this. That being said, students were only invited to talk more about their individual responses if they felt comfortable and the recording was taken and published with their consent.

References:
1. Morgan, D. L. (1988). Focus groups as qualitative research. Sage publications.
2. Wilson, V. (1997). Focus groups: a useful qualitative method for educational research?. British Educational Research Journal, 23(2), 209-224.
3. Kitzinger, J. (1994). The methodology of focus groups: the importance of interaction between research participants. Sociology of health & illness, 16(1), 103-121.
4. OpenAI ChatGPT (2024) ChatGPT response to Ravin Raori, 28 November.