Abstract
Focus groups became popular in social research in the 1980s. Robert Merton has pointed to the continuities and discontinuities between focus groups and the wartime use of ‘focused interviewing’ he and his colleagues developed at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Using a variety of sources, the paper attempts to chart the ways in which focused interviewing came to be taken up, diffused and modified in marketing research before re-emerging into sociology as the focus group.
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Notes
Although the term ‘focused interview’ is used throughout this article and was used by Merton and his colleagues in their published writing, it should be noted that Merton himself had a personal preference for the alternative spelling, ‘focussed interview’ (1987, 559). Where a later writer referring to Merton et al’s work uses ‘focussed’ rather than ‘focused’ the spelling has been preserved here in quotation. Since ‘focussed’ was used in internal BASR documents, its use in subsequent writing often, but not invariably, indicates that the writer was referring to earlier unpublished versions of Merton et al’s work.
Merton had explored these aspects of intellectual diffusion for the concept of ‘serendipity’ in a long-unpublished work written with Elinor Barber (Merton and Barber 2004) and playfully in his (1965) book On the Shoulders of Giants which traces the origins of the aphorism “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” usually attributed to Isaac Newton.
Merton and his colleagues saw focused interviewing as a general approach applicable to a range of situations. While their book contained a chapter on interviewing groups, this was largely seen as a special case to which the more general procedures and techniques set out by the authors could be applied. As Merton comments, “We never used the term ‘focus group’—at least not as I recall ...” (1987, 563).
There was a gendered division of labour at the Bureau of Applied Social Research (Rossiter 1995). Some familiar with the Bureau, like David Riesman (Lee 2008a), were more aware of this than others, (see, e.g., Sterne (2005) on C. Wright Mills). The precise nature of the collaboration between Merton and Kendall and Fiske is unclear. For some passing comment, see Merton (1998, 169; 208). Merton seems to have been scrupulous in crediting his co-workers.
Simonson (2005) notes that even before the war Merton had developed an interest in propaganda, an interest accelerated for him, given his Jewish ancestry, by a trip to Austria and Germany in 1937.
The ability to point to unexpected findings had an important rhetorical purpose. It could be used to undermine the criticism that the findings of sociological research were commonsensical.
One strand of citation-based research examines, usually in a quantitative way, topics such as the extent to which particular works are cited in other works, trends in citation, and patterns of co-citation. Here, the link between one document and another is used as an indicator of how the citing work is related to the cited. (Borgman and Furner 2002). Indicators of this kind have a broad spectrum of use, including assessments of the impact of particular authors, and the intellectual mapping of particular fields and disciplines. As Borgman and Furner point out, work of this kind can, and often does, have an evaluative component leading to the distribution of resources and rewards for individuals, fields, and institutions based on the ranking of indicators. A second strand of research tends to be focused on the act of citation itself, often seeking to uncover or impute the motivations associated with the decision to cite a particular work. Some writers have addressed such matters by directly questioning authors about their citing practices (see, e.g., Shadish et al. 1995).
Although the sociologist Emory Bogardus had made use of group interviewing in the 1920s, this seems largely to have been for reasons of convenience rather than being an explicit methodological choice. (On Bogardus and the interview more generally, see Lee 2008b).
See also Stewart et al. 2006.
Thus his use of ‘focussed’ rather than ‘focused’.
I am grateful to Kristina Eden of the Michigan Information Transfer Source facility at the University of Michigan for help in locating and acquiring this article.
If Rogers is right, there might well be some significance to use of the hybrid form ‘focus-group interview.’ Hyphenation, here, presumably both stands for and replaces the inflexional suffix ‘-ed’.
One can probably dismiss as unlikely a possible reason for use of the term ‘focus group’ at BBDO. Alex Osborn, one of the founders of BBDO and originator of the technique of ‘brainstorming’, was a fervent admirer of Winston Churchill (Osborn 1948, 116). During the 1930s Churchill was a member of an anti-Nazi organisation sometimes called ‘The Focus Group’ (see Nicolson 1966, 327). The existence of this group, more properly called ‘Focus in Defence of Freedom and Peace’ was not disclosed publicly until 1963 (Addison 1993).
Tobacco industry documents have been used for academic research, as well as for investigative and advocacy purposes. In many cases, researchers have used the material to explore the various ways in which tobacco companies acted to deflect criticism and hinder regulation, often using deceptive or manipulative tactics (MacKenzie et al. 2003).
Use of the Tobacco Industry Documents for research purposes can be methodologically challenging (Bero 2003; Carter 2005). Retrieved document sets are not always complete and, given the operation of the litigation process, are subject to a degree of selection bias relative to the total universe of documents. There is no reason to suppose, however, that there is any particular bias in the documents in relation to discussions of particular research methods. Somewhat more problematic are the issues surrounding the dating of documents. Based on figures in Kretzschmar et al. (2004), around 2% of documents are undated. Misdating of documents also occurs. The extent of misdating is unclear although it likely to be at a level that is more than merely trivial. The volume of documents returned by a given search can be extremely large, but is likely to contain much material that is redundant. Since the documents were obtained as part of a litigation process, multiple copies of the same document are common. For example, a document circulated to a number of parties might be produced in relation to each individual as a product of the discovery process. This level of redundancy makes management of the documents and quantitative analysis of them problematic. Material can also sometimes be compromised by the poor quality of optical character recognition in some of the scanned documents. Again, such difficulties are unlikely to have produced any marked degree of systematic bias.
A document on focused group interviews estimated by indexers to date from 1963 was also found, but contained no independent corroborating evidence for its date.
It is difficult to decide what the most appropriate base figure for comparison purposes might be here. The total number of documents in the database for each time period is as follows: 1965–69: 178,439; 1970–74: 273,766: 1975–79, 526,751: 1980–84, 720,630.
Focused interviewing was scaleable, not just in the sense that it could be applied to groups as well as individuals, but in that it could also be utilised, in effect, on an industrial scale. This, of course, required an infrastructure for conducting and recording groups. That infrastructure was provided by the growing use of specialist focus group facilities with their one-way mirrors, client-viewing rooms, and video-recording equipment and which offered a performative space for moderators to display their skills. (On ‘white room’ settings, see Lezaun 2007.) It should be apparent that one gap in the story of focus groups is when and how this infrastructure first developed. The necessity for a ‘fieldwork of the office’ (Lee 2004) was hardly new. Early technological constraints on sound recording meant that, until the advent of magnetic recording, potential respondents commonly had to be brought to a facility where the interview could be conducted by stenographic or phonographic means. Interviewing in groups, however, created additional infrastructural demands, as well as opportunities for economies of scale.
Kleinman et al. (1994) point to situations where qualitative researchers have come to feel that their social identity as an ethnographer was compromised or diminished by conducting fieldwork based only on interviewing. To some extent, of course, focus groups might assuage this concern by seeming to provide a less individuated component to solely interview-based work.
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Lee, R.M. The Secret Life of Focus Groups: Robert Merton and the Diffusion of a Research Method. Am Soc 41, 115–141 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-010-9090-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-010-9090-1