-: Hello and welcome to the video lecture
on key informant interviews and focus groups,
which are two
very common, qualitative, data collection methods
used by social scientists.
So, this is what you're gonna talk about, these two types:
Key informant and focus groups, compare and contrast,
and some how-tos of sort of, what's a good use of each one,
and what are some key considerations when you use them.
So, again, we're gonna compare and contrast these two,
talk about their pros and cons,
and which ones are better to use
in a given setting.
So, comparing them, they are both qualitative methods,
they're both a form of interviews.
You have folks give their responses in their own words,
so they're therefore more valid, less reliable.
Very often they are recorded or transcribed,
or, I mean, recorded and then transcribed,
especially work for a thesis,
a grad student thesis,
or dissertation, or faculty research, or both.
And they're both effective
at gaining your research subject's
perspectives, perceptions, experiences,
what are their experiences
of the matter that you are researching.
They can be flexible and vary in depth.
Now, to contrast them,
focus groups are just that, they are groups.
So, they tend to be something like 5 to 10 per group.
Usually you have to pay the subjects,
and if they're in person,
provide some food and drink.
I have used a virtual focus group,
like on Teams and Zooms, and those work too,
and, of course, you can virtually send
somebody a drink or a bag of chips, but anyway...
And the key is you want your subjects
to interact with each other
and build on each other's responses.
And you often would want to have both a facilitator
who sort of asks the questions and keeps things moving,
and a note taker,
and you compose these groups,
you create these groups
so that they are homogeneous within, and diverse without.
So you think about a dimension, a variability
that you think is important,
and each group has,
inside of each group
has folks that sort of share that attribute.
And then each group sort of
do not share.
So you might wanna group people by race,
and have a group of African Americans,
and a group of Latinos, and a group of Asians,
and a group of white people or something like that.
You might want a group
that are all high-income or a low-income
that are of the same age,
that live in the same spot.
But that's the key here is you want
the subjects within the groups to be more alike,
but to have key differences from group to group.
So you might wanna think about
how can you construct focus groups
that are homogeneous within, diverse without
for our project?
In contrast of focus group,
key informant interviews are usually one-on-one
that there might be a small group there,
but for the most part
they're just the researcher and the subject,
they're more commonly unpaid.
And the key informant is
that someone who knows about the subject,
who is knowledgeable, has experience,
and they can speak about that thing.
And, again, to think about
who would be some key informants for our project,
who knows about this,
who is knowledgeable, who has experience,
who has valuable perspectives
on the subject that we can learn from.
So there's a number of times when it is
prudent to use focus groups,
and I'm gonna walk through a few.
So, first, if there's a great deal of power hierarchy
where the subjects may not feel safe,
really sharing their experiences, one-on-one,
there might be sort of safety in numbers
where they feel more safe speaking
within a group,
especially folks that are sort of lower
in the power hierarchy scale.
Next, is when
the subjects sort of
have very different perspectives and terminology
that the researcher may not understand
and can gain a better understanding
of that sort of specific worldview
and the sort of lingo they use
in terms by having a group.
Similarly to the first one,
if there's sort of a lot of conflict or mistrust,
that having it in a group
might sort of make them feel heard,
and make them more honest about what their experiences are.
And the final reason is
that if you're afraid
that your subjects might not take it seriously,
that having them answer in a group, there may be more...
the group will hold them accountable.
And if they say something that is sort of not true,
or if they're just making,
you know, a sarcastic or remark, or like that,
the group can kind of hold them,
and make it accountable and say,
you know, "No, that isn't my experience."
So, again, the pros are
this sort of safety and affirmation in numbers,
or when many voices may be needed
to overcome complexity or unfamiliarity.
There are also a number of cons.
It can also be hard to tell like, "Who said what?"
You know, when you have a group
who gave each response may be important
but may be harder to track that you need skilled moderation.
It takes time and effort to get, you know,
a bunch of people at the same place at the same time.
And you need a controlled environment,
and may need to pay for the room,
for the participants, for the snacks, and things like that.
So, key informant interviews,
again, are more commonly one-on-one
that you wanna familiarize with a topic,
and you talk with a fairly small number of folks
that have the information and experience
that you want that are familiar and knowledgeable.
This can also be used to...
we talked about snowball sampling of finding others
that are knowledgeable that can build on that.
The advantages are that you get
a detailed, enriched dataset,
and there's a good deal of flexibility.
The responses are very valid and
if you find that there's an important matter
that you didn't ask,
in some cases
you can go back and say like,
"Hey, I didn't ask you this," or
maybe something that they said that wasn't clear.
You can in theory go back
and ask the new question or have them clarify.
The downside is to find the right informants
that sort of represent
the breadth of possible responses.
While not as hard as focus groups,
still getting people
to respond to your emails
and show up to the interviews may be hard,
and you cannot generalize
the results to any larger
population.
And so, they're just going
to give you their own impressions.
They're gonna tell you, hopefully,
what they truly know and think,
and believe and how they behave,
but there is prone to social desirability bias.
And this is a well-known problem in social science research
where folks are not giving the right answer,
because in some cases,
they will tell you what you want to hear,
or they will tell you
what they think makes them look good
instead of what is the actual truth for them,
and we'll be talking more about this and how to avoid it.
So, this is what we did.
We compared and contrasted
and talked about how to,
and when to use key informant interviews and focus groups.
Thank you.