I recently had the opportunity to take part in an asynchronous online focus group. So, I did; not least because I was curious to know what it would be like. I found it a rather odd experience. I had a few problems with the tech to start with, which was a bit annoying but is not unusual. I managed to get it sorted in the end – my pop-up blockers were to blame – but I did come close to abandoning the whole exercise through frustration at having to email support people rather than doing what I needed to do in the group. I’m not a techie, but I understand that it can be difficult to create a platform which works seamlessly on any type of hardware – laptop, tablet, mobile etc – and in any browser. So, tolerance may be required for participating in research online.

Once I got into the online environment, I found a series of intriguing questions to work through. Others had already responded to some of the questions so I could take their responses into account. (I don’t think I was supposed to be able to see them until I had answered each question myself, but I could see them, so I read them before formulating my own answers.) Even so, it didn’t feel at all like a group. I have facilitated many in-person focus groups and the interactions between group members are definitely a big part of the process; so much so that some researchers have chosen to analyse these as well as the transcript. Maybe if there had been more responses and exchanges it might have felt more like a group discussion, but I think it would still have felt like quite a solitary, albeit interesting, endeavour.

I think part of why it didn’t feel much like a group was the amount of reading and viewing required. The focus group didn’t only have questions to answer, but also text, videos, and diagrams to digest in between each question. Also, there were points where to give a full answer, I would have needed to stop and read a couple of journal articles and/or book chapters, and/or take a walk to think about the issue. But I didn’t because of time. 

This focus group had 10 discussion topics, most of which included at least a dozen questions. In theory, we could choose a topic to focus on, but in practice, I found I had no option but to work through all of the questions from the start (though it is entirely possible that this was due to my technological incompetence). As a result, I spent more time feeling a sense of urgency to get through all the many questions than happily engaging with the interesting material presented. It took me almost three hours to work through the questions at speed. I skip-read some of the text and skipped almost all the videos. I started to watch one in an area I was particularly interested in but then saw that it was 17 minutes long and decided I couldn’t allocate that much time. I tried to start another but the software asked for access to my camera and microphone so I said no because of the security risks. If I had engaged with everything as thoroughly as the researcher no doubt wanted me to – and as I would have liked to myself, if my time was unlimited – I think it would have taken me at least a full day to work through all the materials and answer all the questions. And when I did eventually get to the end, it was just the end. After all that work I would have liked a ‘thank you’ message at the very least, and ideally a big burst of fireworks on the screen! Though I expect the researcher didn’t do that because they were only expecting participants to focus on one or two topics.

The group was online for a couple of months and the researcher included various messages encouraging members to come back and respond to others’ input. I can see why this would be useful for the research, but I couldn’t see much – if any – evidence of people doing that, even though my own contributions were made closer to the end than the start of the operational period. Also, I didn’t go back and add further responses myself. I felt as if I should, but I didn’t get around to it. There was no option to receive email alerts when a new answer was posted, which might have helped, though everyone’s inboxes are overstuffed so if that option had been available I might well not have taken it up, or taken it up and then deleted the emails without reading them. 

I could see that the researcher had worked hard to try to provide a good online environment in which their expert participants could engage with specialised material. Alternative methods could include: reducing the number of questions, or separating the sections into different “focus groups” in different online spaces and asking people to participate in one or more of those groups in accordance with their interests, preferences, and capacities. Also, I think for participation which is so complex and time-consuming, there should really be an incentive, though I know not everyone has a budget for such things.

Although I found it quite onerous, participation was useful because it provided some insight into the potential impacts of this method on a participant. That gave me some ideas about what to do and not do if I ever want to use asynchronous online focus groups myself, or if I am mentoring someone who wants to use this method. It was also useful because the researcher who set it up was doing their best to research a complex and important piece of work which is likely to end up helping a lot of people. Although aspects of the experience were frustrating at times, my interest in methods renders those aspects also interesting to me in retrospect. So overall I think it was time well spent.