230133 SE Researching focus groups and participatory spaces: From design to analysis (2014S)

In the last few decades, focus groups have moved from being used as a market research instrument allowing fast access to people's opinions to the core of qualitative research methods in the social sciences. While the majority of focus group research is still carried out as mere content analysis, thus neglecting largely the interactional character of these settings, there also exist more recent trends that try to capture the emergence of group processes in such settings. Since focus groups are above all groups, they lend themselves to gain insights into social processes that are for instance not easily accessible by interview methods.
At the same time, political debates over science and technology have shifted to more democratic modes of governance where public participation and engagement play a relevant role. In participatory spaces, 'the public' is invited into discussion processes as a partner in a dialogue, deliberating on how to best shape the future of new technologies and society, often together with scientists and policy makers. Like in focus groups, citizens are thus increasingly seen as knowledge holders whose experiences and opinions matter for responsible research and innovation. For these reasons public engagement initiatives favoured from the very beginning group constellations, such as consensus conferences, citizen's juries, stakeholder workshops as well as focus group-like settings. As with traditional focus groups, however, there is still a need to investigate how discursive processes take place in participatory spaces and how the interaction as such produces certain outcomes, since debated issues cannot be understood as disentangled from the interactive context in which they are produced.
The course will start by retelling the history of focus groups and participatory research in science and technology studies and then move on to more practical issues concerning the design and moderation of such group settings. Participants will be able to try out what it means to moderate and participate in discussion groups to get hands on experience and to sharpen their reflexive skills. In terms of analytical methods, the course will pay particular attention to discourse analytical traditions that can be fruitfully applied to analyse talk-in-interaction. Such discursive approaches enable an understanding of focus groups and collective public engagement settings as discursive spaces to explore more fundamental epistemological and methodological questions of how people construct and negotiate knowledge claims in dialogical processes. Students will be introduced to the 'art of discourse analysis' in empirical interpretation groupsdiscourse analysis is to a large part an art because it has to be practiced together with others and cannot be simply learned from textbooks. Thus, the course will cover the whole research process, ranging from the research design over the compositions and conduction of discussion groups to the methods of analysis that fit best to each settings and research interest. Although not being the main focus, we will also raise issues neglected by discourse analytic methods such as the materialities of such spaces.