Focus Group Research: Retrospect and Prospect

This chapter is both historical and conceptual, first highlighting the origins, tensions, and continuities/discontinuities of focus group research and then arguing for how such research embodies three primary, related functions: inquiry, pedagogy, and political. The quasiunique potentials or affordances of focus group work are explored, including mitigating the researcher’s authority; disclosing the constitutive power of discourse; approximating the natural; filling in knowledge gaps and saturating understanding; drawing out complexity, nuance, and contradiction; disclosing eclipsed connections; and creating opportunities for political activism. Contemporary threats to focus group work are described and new research frontiers are proposed, especially in relation to new information technologies. The chapter integrates historical, conceptual, and practical perspectives to fully explain the potentials of focus group research, with the goal of advancing a set of understandings about focus group work that attends to its relatively unique potentials for conducting qualitative inquiry across a wide range of topics and disciplinary contexts.