Hello everyone,
I am doing my methods chapter (Qualitative - Social Sciences) and am facing a question.
1) In regards to stimulate a focus group discussion ( through vignettes):
How do I know whether I should vary the conditions (scenarios)? within or between each focus group so that you can provoke that variation? Or should I use the same condition and use an outcome measure question and then work backwards from those groups?
Quite confused right now.
Thank you all!
You need to consider what your research questions are with regard to the differences in vignettes. In particular, do you want to determine whether there are substantive differences in how the participants respond to the two vignettes? If so, then you should show them to separate sets of groups, because if you show groups both sets of vignettes, then how they responded to the first one will influence how they respond to the second one.
One possible alternative is to show all the groups both vignettes, but to rotate the order in which you have them discuss each one. So half the groups would start with Vignette-A and then do B, while the other half would reverse that order. But this could still produce effects due to seeing both vignettes if the ordering makes a difference (e.g., if the effect of the A-B ordering is different than the B-A ordering).
David L Morgan thank you very much for clarifying me this point. Really helped me here.
However, can you help me in regards to the advantages of using the same conditions throughout (with or without the variation as suggested) but using an outcome based measure (what would this even look like), and work backwards (discourse analysis)?
Am I just overly-complicating this?
Thank you!
Focus groups (and other qualitative methods" do not generally use outcome measures, due to both the subjective nature of the procedures and the small sample sizes. But if your question is how to assess the nature of the discussion in two different types of groups, here is my attempt to do that:
Article A System for Coding the Interaction in Focus Groups and Dyad...
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