Task 6a iii) Pilot Focus Group and 6b Critical Reflection

For my focus group I came to the decision with time against me trying to co-ordinate six different individuals discussed in my previous blog http://rebeccajanegaskell24.blogspot.com/2011/04/task-6a-iii-pilot-focus-group-plan.html was going to be too difficult near impossible with everyone’s time table constraints.

So on last Saturday I went ahead with my smaller pilot focus group with just three people. Using the same questions from my pilot interviews found on http://rebeccajanegaskell24.blogspot.com/2011/04/6a-i-pilot-interviews-and-6b-critical.html I went ahead and began my pilot focus group discussions.

People were happy introducing themselves and it was great to get an insight into all of their personal training and professional experience backgrounds relating to musical theatre, acting, singing dance and teaching within the arts. The diversity of the group was good but ideally I still would have liked to include all six of my initial candidates.

By keeping the group smaller I felt it allowed a lot of ideas and discussions to develop minimising the risk of some maybe stronger personalities overtaking and stopping other less out spoken people having an equal input if the group were to have been larger.

Trying to collate everyone’s opinions and decipher where they came from and what question or statement had led them to that conclusion made it difficult to trace all comments back to the source at times. If I were to repeat this scenario I would require permission to video all applicants response where I could re assess and notate all comments for further use once the session was complete.

I can see how having my initial proposed six participants would have been somewhat challenging to have kept thoughts and ideas focussed on my inquiry exploring the different training methods performers choose in order to prepare themselves adequately for a professional career, without becoming side tracked and loosing the main area of focus.

Having explored the benefits and limitations of my pilot focus group I'm not sure comparing it to my one-on-one interviews and survey information if this process could bring anything more for my inquiry. On the whole I felt with my interviews I gained an open and honest response where the interviewee was free to discuss their opinions without having to wait their turn or be spoken over. Although I felt opinions were shared openly in the focus group they weren't always able to share freely having to wait for an opportunity or possibly miss their chance.

I was able to somewhat keep the topic of conversation on track relating to my inquiry topic looking at how, where and when all performers training started and how beneficial or not they felt it was, is or could be to their future, current career success and life span.
Taking into consideration the variety of people within my initial proposed pilot group of six people, on reflection I feel that some may not have been as open with how they viewed their stance and experience because it may have been difficult to ensure complete confidentiality with all involved. I felt the larger group became people would become more aware of possible opposing opinions and may be less likely to speak their mind.

With my actual pilot focus group of three people I informed all participants that I would keep their opinions private and not disclose their identity to anyone outside of the group unless they allowed me to quote them with prior permission. The more people brought into the equation the more I felt the possibility of ensuring anonymity from all parties would become more challenging. With this in mind the lengths I would have to go to get all participants to sign disclaimers out way the overall outcome of the process.

The focus group was great for looking at the variety of courses and institutes people trained at and gave me a great insight into areas that could strengthen my inquiry. However looking at the results I feel using one-on one interview, observations and my survey would aid my inquiry and information discovery freer and easier in the long run and the focus group couldn't add much more than the other inquiry tools could.

If I were to repeat this focus group in order to see if I could make the process more beneficial I would maybe combine two tools by interviewing all candidates first and then put them in a focus group together to see if their opinions changed or not to reaffirm their stance and therefore I would know I had as much strength in their true opinions as possible and everyone would have had an equal as possible input into my inquiry.