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In contrast to a vast literature that provides information and guides about focus groups as a methodological tool, this book is an introduction to understanding focus groups as analytical means exploring socially shared knowledge, e.g. social representations of AIDS, biotechnology or democracy, beliefs and lay explanations of social phenomena. The main emphasis of the book is to examine how to analyse interaction and ideas expressed in focus groups. The book considers, first, different kinds of dynamic interdependencies among participants who hold the diverse and heterogeneous positions. Second, it explores circulations of ideas and contents in focus groups. More generally, the book is concerned with
List of contents
Preface 1. Dialogism: Interaction, Social Knowledge and Dialogue 2. Focus Groups through the Lens of Dialogism 3. Dialogical Analysis of Focus Groups: Data and Analytical Approaches 4. Focus Groups as Communicative Activity Types 5. Who is Speaking in Focus Groups? The Dialogical Display of Heterogeneity 6. Dialogue and the Circulation of Ideas 7. Themata in Dialogue: Taking Social Knowledge as Shared 8. Focus Groups as a Dialogical Method Appendix 1: Basic Bibliography on Tool Kits and Methodological Guidelines Appendix 2: Focus Group Data Corpuses Appendix 3: The 'Moral Dilemma' Focus Groups: Excerpts in Original Language
About the author
Ivana Markova is Professor of Psychology at the University of Stirling in Scotland, UK. She is the author of Paradigms, Thought and Language (1982), Human Awareness (1987), Dialogicality and Social Representations (2003). Per Linell is a sociolinguist and Professor in the interdisciplinary graduate school of communication studies at Linkoping University, Sweden. He has published widely within the field of discourse studies, and his most recent work is The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations (2005). Michele Grossen is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Anne Salazar-Orvig is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris 3.
Summary
An introduction to understanding focus groups as analytical means exploring socially shared knowledge. This book examines how to analyse interaction and ideas expressed in focus groups. It considers different kinds of interdependencies among participants who hold diverse positions. It explores circulations of ideas and contents in focus groups.
