International Journal of Qualitative Methods: ARCHIVE
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Using Focus Groups to Research Sensitive Issues: Insights from Group Interviews on Nursing in the Northern Ireland “Troubles”
No full textIn this article the authors discuss the usefulness of focus groups for researching sensitive issues using evidence from a study examining the experiences of nurses providing care in the context of the Northern Ireland Troubles. They conducted three group interviews with nurses during which they asked about the issues the nurses face(d) in providing nursing care amid enduring social division. Through a discursive analysis of within-group interaction, they demonstrate how participants employ a range of interpretive resources, the effect of which is to prioritize particular knowledge concerning the nature of nursing care. The identification of such patterned activity highlights the ethnographic value of focus groups to reveal social conventions guiding the production of accounts but also suggests that accounts cannot be divorced from the circumstances of their production. Consequently, the authors argue that focus groups should be considered most useful for illuminating locally sanctioned ways of talking about sensitive issues
Views from the Village: Photonovella with Women in Rural China
No full textIn this article the authors provide an overview of the situation of women in rural China as a backdrop for the photonovella process and inquiry activities conducted by the first author in three rural sites in China. They describe the key themes identified through analysis of the narrative accounts and photographs presented by groups of rural women. The photonovella enabled rural women to select from their pictures several photos of significance to them to show and describe these to women from other villages and to the researcher. Concerns, interests, hardships, and achievements of the women related to their work, families, and communities were voiced as they showed their photos. This method, used in conjunction with other qualitative methods—including focus group interviews, village visits, and survey data—provided information that complemented and enriched our understanding of rural women’s lives in China
The Leaps of Faith in Social Science: A Study of the Imagined in the Discourse of the Real
No full textIn this paper, the author introduces a post-Meadian concept useful for contemporary ethnography. Emergent ideal types capture the imaginary (that which is not bound to space and time coordinates) in the doing ethnography and making empirical claims (the empirical is considered that which is limited to space and time coordinates). She uses a heuristic device, grounded narrative fictions, as one way of depicting the imaginary for ethnographic audiences. The exploration draws on the ethnography of a kindergarten/Grade 1 class. The author does not use many scholarly references. Instead, she tries to develop two innovations to ethnographic analysis (emergent ideal types and grounded narrative fictions) from within an ethnographic example. She tries in this thought piece to explicate the linguistic mechanisms through which ethnographers draw on the imaginary to link empirical patterns with interpretive analyses