I did a research on teenage pregnancy among refugee girls in Melbourne Australia. I conducted focus groups in addition to In-depth interviews.

All participants including focus group participants had to sign individual confidentiality forms in addition to consent forms. Confidentiality was emphasised to all group members and why it was important for all involved to respect confidentiality. I found that providing a detailed explanation to participants and reasons for not disclosing what is discussed outside the focus group worked well.

My informed consents state that because of the nature of focus groups that I cannot control that aspect of it and I ask them to respect the other and not share information outside the group. I do make sure to conduct the focus groups in locations so that persons outside the group cannot identify them as being in the group or as a participant.

I have not conducted studies, but I still have my Ethics training fresh in my mind.. I have learned that it would be good protocol to have the participants sign a confidentiality agreement, or do in-depth interviews in a private environment. What specific framework are you using?

I would say that you can encourage confidentiality as suggested in other answers and you can ask people to sign confidentiality forms but you can never in fact ENSURE confidentiality. Therefore, while I would always try to lay the basis for this in preliminary ground rules, participants should also always be aware that what they say might be disclosed beyond the group. 'Over-disclosure' is a real danger in group discussions as people can get carried along with the discussion. Great care is needed to do no harm.

I would agree with the comments that are already posted. You can never truly guarantee confidentiality in a focus group, even with confidentiality forms; however, there are things you can put in place to give participants a certain level of anonymity. I had participants give themselves a pseudonym upon arrival, so no one else in the focus group knew their true name.

I used focus groups for data collection for my thesis about ethical issues experienced by stroke team members when patients were dying from a sudden and unexpected acute stroke. The ethcis committe had no objections on that in relation to confidentiality. I followed the advice from previous answers. I can recommend Krueger, RA, & Casey, MA. (2000). Focus Groups : A Practical Guide for Applied Research. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, for reading about this and other issues on focus group research.

Having taught ethics as well as research to graduate students, I agree that confidentiality can never be truly guaranteed, in particular if the data is published with direct quotes (as qualitative data often is), a participant may be recognizable according to a quote. This information should be included in the plain language statement.