Voicing the Less Heard: A Review of Focus Group Methodology: Principles and Practice

Fezile: From rape you get AIDS. Gugu: AIDS is rape. Researcher: What's rape? Nokulunga: When an older person calls you and does bad things to you. Milondi: A person grabs you when you are going to the shops and then does bad things to you. Nontobeko: When he's doing bad things to you ... he puts his penis in you with force (Bhana, 2009, p. 596 as cited in Liamputtong, 2011). This excerpt that took place in a focus group interview among seven to eight years-old young African children in a rural area in South Africa (Bhana, 2009, p. 596) opens Dr. Liamputtong's (2011) Focus Group Methodology: Principles and Practice book. From this very first moment of reading these lines, the author's point in the power of focus groups in raising the voices of the less heard populations about the less heard topics was apparent. This is the most salient feature of this book as it has been revisited directly or indirectly throughout the book. Dr. Liamputtong (2011) puts her position about the nature of focus group methodology from the first pages of the book in chapter one and defends it throughout the book. She argues that, contrary to the practices in marketing research where the moderator in a focus group is the most active person, participants (should) have an active role in a focus group conducted in social sciences. This emphasis directs the reader's attention to the fact that a focus group is more than a group interview and it should value and emphasize group interaction. Therefore, from the first pages of the book, Dr. Liamputtong gives insights to the readers/researchers about how to conduct a focus group by providing them the underlying characteristics and philosophy behind this methodology. There are several aspects of this book that make it user-friendly and easy-to-understand for students and/or novice researchers as is also claimed by the author. One such aspect is the well-thought and consistent organization of each chapter. Each chapter starts with chapter objectives, which introduce the chapter contents and subheadings. This helps readers to easily skip throughout the book in order to find what is relevant to their needs. Following the chapter objectives, she provides a brief introduction of what the chapter is about and a brief summary of what points she will be discussing in that particular chapter. Each chapter also has a conclusion in which she briefly restates the main arguments she has provided. What was especially valuable to me as a beginning qualitative researcher and a doctoral candidate was the Tutorial Activities section at the end of each chapter. With these activities she aims at not only making the reader think over the issues discussed in the chapter but also apply what has been learned to a similar research context. For example, after focus group methodology and practicalities has been discussed in chapter five, the tutorial activity provided is as follows: You are working on your focus group research project in which you wish to learn about the disability and chronic illness in your local area. 1. How will you prepare your focus groups? 2. How will you run your focus groups? 3. What questions will you use to elicit information from the participants? 4. How will you ensure that you obtain in-depth information? 5. How will you record your focus groups? Write down your plans and your question guide so that others can duplicate your work in other local areas (Liamputtong, 2011, p. 86). In sharing this information, she helps the readers to appreciate that the activity enables researchers to think of possible ways of applying what has been learned to an imaginary yet real-life research context. Additionally, these activities facilitate the practical use of this text in qualitative research courses. These activities can be assigned to students so that they can write reflection papers and/or small-scale research proposals. …