Focus Groups and Ethnography
Human Organization March 1, 1995 Michael Agar, James E. Macdonald 364 citations
Focus groups are increasingly used in applied social research. Two anthropologist-ethnographers demonstrate how a focus group with former LSD-using adolescents, when analyzed with conversational analysis techniques and interpreted as indexes of broader folk-models drawn from other ethnographic data, produces deeper insights than focus groups used alone. The authors show that integrating focus group transcripts with additional ethnographic evidence yields richer understandings of participants' perspectives and cultural models.