Discuss the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Focus Groups as a Research Tool

This essay is going to analyse the use of focus groups as a research method in modern day social sciences. The disadvantages and the advantages will be discussed, and furthermore the use of focus groups as a research method against using other research methods will be evaluated. A case study will also be reviewed in order to describe the use of focus groups; furthermore the case study would be critically discussed in order to reflect on the success or the failure of the study. Using this case study, a dissertation topic will be written about; the dissertation topic that one has chosen is how Muslim women keep in touch with British culture as well as their own Islam culture when there are so many contradictions between the two.
A focus group is becoming a more common technique in order to interview participants, they have been used in market research since the 1920s (Basch, 1987), and they were also used to gauge the public’s morale during world war two, by Merton (Merton and Kendall, 1955). It was here that the term “focussed interview” was coined and ever since they have become more and more frequent in the social sciences. The group is classed as focus as they do an activity together, such as discuss issues or read a magazine for example. However, the main aim of this technique is to see the interaction between participants and thus it is a useful tool in interviewing. Also, one other aspect of focus groups is that not only do they gauge the interaction between participants but also the observer can oversee “collective remembering” as shown by a study partaken by Kitzinger. He explored how people talked about AIDs by using participants who knew each other, through this he was able to see the interactions as they naturally would, or “naturally occurring data” (Kitzinger, 1994: 105). Therefore, focus groups are an important tool for gathering data in the field of social sciences. Also a focus group is more than a group interview “because of the community of

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