Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences

The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) organises an annual Summer School, offering one- and two-week courses in various social-scientific research methods. This year, the 4th ECPR Summer School was organised in cooperation with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, from 29th July to 15th August. I had the opportunity to participate in the one-week course ‘Organising and Analysing Focus Groups’, which was held by Dr. Sophie Duchesne, who is a senior researcher at the Sciences-Political research Centre (Paris) and teaches methodology at the University of Oxford (Department of Politics and International Relations).

Focus groups have become an important social-scientific research method over the past years. In contrast to face-to-face interviews, they offer the chance to gain highly valuable insights from the discourse and interactions between different participants. The method not only supports a deeper understanding of social phenomena and dynamics, but can foster dialogue between stakeholders that would usually not have taken place and hence create incentives for socio-political developments. However, designing, organising, and analysing focus groups is a difficult task. Many decisions are involved in selecting participants, setting up facilities, designing questions, moderating discussions, and recording information that may introduce serious biases and/or completely undermine the success of the entire event. Furthermore, analysing the obtained information is much more intricate, complex, and time-consuming than in the case of face-to-face interviews. Thus, organising and analysing focus groups requires a high level of competence.

While I have many experiences in carrying out semi-structured face-to-face interviews, I have never organised a focus group, but have planned to do so as part of my PhD project on land use change and environmental governance in the Segara Anakan lagoon and its catchment are in Java, Indonesia. Hence the ECPR Summer School provided a perfect opportunity for me to learn about the method in an efficient way.

The more ironic it was that our lecturer, Dr. Sophie Duchesne, admitted at the beginning of the first day that she would try to discourage most of us from using focus groups within the scope of our PhD projects until the end of the course. Subsequently, I learned a lot about focus groups, including their evolution as a research method, their application in different disciplines, their differences with face-to-face interviews, their relationship with social-scientific ways of thinking, their types, their orgainsation and moderation, and finally their analysis. What i learned about analysing interactions between people, the evolution of discussions, group dynamics including the formation of alliances and conflicts, the emergence of ideas and opinions, rhetoric and body language is crucial for organising and analysing focus groups but beyond that beneficial in the context of other social-scientific research methods.

Although using focus groups as a research method within the scope of a PhD project is ambitious and involves high levels of uncertainty, I am not completely discouraged of using that method after the end of the course, but more aware of its dangers as well as potentials. Participation in the summer school was a very concise and efficient way of getting a good overview of focus groups. Although their use in Indonesia would require numerous modifications of what I learned about focus groups as they are carried out in the frame of socio-political research in a European-cultural context, the seminar provided me with insights that are certainly useful for my PhD project and beyond. Last but not least, the exchange with people from nine different European countries was definitely an enriching experience. Thanks to Dr. Sophie Duchesne and Virginie Van Ingelgom for organising the course and to GLOMAR for the funding!

For more information about the ECPR Summer School in general and the course on Focus Groups in particular, see: http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/summerschools/ljubljana/index/aspx