education

Asynchronous Online Focus Groups

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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.

How to bring creativity to your research

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Last year I wrote a post to announce this forthcoming series. Now, I am delighted to say, it is no longer forthcoming – it’s here! 

The first book in the series, Photovoice Reimagined by Nicole Brown, is published today. There are three others scheduled for publication this year. Fiction and Research, by Becky Tipper and Leah Gilman, will be published in July; Doing Phenomenography, by Amanda Taylor-Beswick and Eva Hornung, will follow in September; and Encountering The World with i-Docs, by Ella Harris, will be available in December. Three more are currently in the writing phase, two proposals are out for review, and I am in discussions with eight or nine other authors or teams of authors about possible future publications. Potential topics under development include enhanced interviewing, poetic inquiry and decolonisation, sandboxing, using comics in research, creative sonic research methods, zines in the research encounter, mapping, journey mapping, inclusive creative fieldwork, creative evaluation, visual scribing, urban exploration, visual methods in practice and emoji coding. 

I decided to edit this series because I knew there were not enough publication opportunities for people writing about creative research methods. That meant students and researchers wanting to learn more about these kinds of methods were struggling to find relevant information. The books in the series are short, practical how-to books, designed to help researchers learn enough to try out the methods for themselves.

This kind of initiative also helps to establish the legitimacy of creative research methods. Now, in the first half of the 21st century, creative research methods are following a similar trajectory to that of qualitative methods in the second half of the 20th century. It may surprise you to know that economists began adopting qualitative methods as early as the 1960s. After much debate, psychologists began using qualitative methods in the 1980s and engineers joined in in the 2010s. Other disciplines also expanded their methodological repertoires and, as a result, academic journals publishing qualitative research were set up for areas of study formerly thought of as quantitative. For example, the journal Qualitative Health Research was founded in 1991, though Qualitative Psychology was not set up until 2013.

At present, creative research methods are perhaps most firmly established in the discipline of education, I suspect because it is such a creative profession. But I am seeing creative methods being used and promoted in a very wide range of disciplines, such as facilities management, health and the politics of fashion. This is reflected in the doctoral students I teach on courses for the National Centre for Research Methods, doctoral training partnerships and universities. Students come to learn about creative methods from arts and humanities and social sciences disciplines. So far, so unsurprising. But I also get engineers, physicists, business students, computer scientists – all sorts in fact. 

In the Euro-Western world we think of creative research methods as new. However, the work of Indigenous methods experts such as Bagele Chilisa from Botswana, Margaret Kovach from Canada and Linda Tuhiwai Smith from New Zealand shows us that creative methods are in fact very old indeed – tens of thousands of years old, in some cases, so very much older than the ‘scientific method’ which has only dominated research in the Euro-Western world for the last few centuries. ‘Older’ does not necessarily equal ‘better’, but in this case I think it does. The scientific method has its place but is not the be-all and end-all of research. Creative methods are more likely to treat people holistically, take context into account and produce rich data and analyses. The scientific method assumes a level of universal consistency and uniformity, while creative methods make space for individual particularities. 

Creative Research Methods in Practice is a small but tangible step on our journey away from the dominance of positivism and post-positivism. These stances emphasise objectivity, which is unachievable, and usually consider experiments to be the ideal form of research. Again, there is a place for experimental methods, but there is also a role in research for all sorts of creative methods, from participatory approaches to autoethnography, board games to computer games, apps to zines. And these are the kinds of methods I aim to showcase in the series. If you would like to write a book for this series, please do get in touch.

Can You Help?

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Dear Friends,

If you are not an academic and my work has had an impact on you, I would like to hear about that. Also, if you are, or were, an academic and my work had an impact on you at a time when you were not an academic, I would like to hear about that too. I am specifically interested in the impact of any of the following:

    • Open courses on Creative Research Methods and/or radical Research Ethics that I have run for NCRM in the UK, online, or in person.

    If you can help, please use my contact form (or my email address, if you have it) to send me a message about which of the above resources had an impact on you and the difference(s) made to you – whether to your thinking, work, career, life, anything at all. Your message can be as short or as long as you like. 

    Many thanks and kind regards,

    Helen