Conducting the Focus Group Workshops and Interviews

Focus group interviews and discussions were coordinated and facilitated by organizing a 4 day workshop at the Miata Conference Center, Youyi Building, Freetown, due to the proximity, as this center is a centrally located venue that hosts the offices of all the line ministries in charge of food regulations. Additional interviewers and rapporteurs were also involved to assist the researcher in developing, verification and validation questions, interviewing and note taking in order to cover satisfactory sample size for the investigation. This workshop followed after data were collected from stages I and II of triangulation to discuss the findings and to undertake initial

work in verifying and validating results from stages I and II as an attempt to complete the triangulation data collection on barriers. The workshop followed desk-based review of each barrier suggested and accepted in stages I and II and a draft report was provided on the last day of the workshop for validation and finalization of barriers to compliance with international HACCP regulations in the Sierra Leone fishery businesses.

This workshop is compatible with the requirement(s) of focus groups because focus groups are semi-structured meetings of people held in an informal setting, moderated by a group leader and /or interviewer, with the aim of soliciting information on a phenomenon under investigation (Carey, 1994). In fact, focus groups are characterized by three major components. These three components distinguish focus groups from other types of meetings such as business meetings or ordinary group discussions, and it is the use of interactions between the participants of the focus groups to achieve specific aim and objective, and therefore different in its entirety other types of meetings, groups discussions or interviews.

The three components of differentiation of the focus groups from other groups meetings are; that it is a technique with the sole aim and objective of soliciting information and collecting data about a phenomenon under investigation; that interaction between the members of the groups is the source of the information accessed and data collected ; and that the researcher of the phenomenon under investigation plays an active role in the groups in order to create the kind of groups discussions suitable for data collection, even if assistant interviewers were involved (Morgan, 1996).

The method of focus groups data collection facilitated by the organization of workshop in this research created a major advantage, because the data were derived from the purposeful use of consistent, systematic and transparent interactions that urged each participants to say what is true or correct to the best of their experience about the “reality” of HACCP barriers in fishery businesses in Sierra Leone, without compromising their integrities and anonymities. This workshop approach was essential because the results of the research could have policy and overall national implications if the suggestions are to be adopted for targeted intervention.

It has also been suggested that focus groups may be held for different purposes, and the different aims and objectives being sought by the facilitators of focus groups could be utilized to illustrate differences among them. For instance, focus groups are converged together for the purpose of market and marketing research, because it is the specific phenomenon under investigation (Perry, 1998). Secondly, focus groups could be held for clinical reasons especially for medical phenomenon of special interest (MacIntosh, 1993). Thirdly, there are focus groups that converge around community action to determine the opinions and understandings of community members about specific phenomenon of special interest to the community or social interest. There are other several examples of focus groups but one that is common in typical research are usually those held in order to determine the ideas, thoughts, views, opinions and understandings of those who are involved in some actions related to the phenomenon under investigation.

In this study, the interviews and discussions of the focus groups were well organized, coordinated and facilitated by workshop in a parallel way to action research approach in order to access the ideas, thoughts, views, opinions and understandings of national stakeholders involved in fishery operations. However, it is important to note that the data was not being utilized in an action research approach in order to alter what the participants of the focus groups workshop were doing, instead it was utilized for triangulating data that were collected in the convergent and case study interviews, stages II and I respectively.

It can be recalled that the use of triangulation in this study involved three stages wherein results obtained in Stage I were passed on to Stage II for acceptance or rejection. Similarly, results from Stage II were used in the focus groups workshop in order to collect data that would either agree or disagree with the findings of Stages II and I. In other words, results from Stage III of the triangulation provided insights onto the ideas, views, thoughts, opinions and understandings of the national stakeholders on the barriers to compliance with international HACCP regulation that could be more easily collected in a group situation.

Moreover, the aim or objective of the focus groups workshop was to investigate and collect the group’s ideas, views, thoughts, opinions and understandings on how the HACCP barriers as identified, could be used to initiate and support targeted intervention to overhaul the national

fishery safety and competitiveness problems by the stakeholders, who have little or no knowledge and experience in HACCP system. That is, by the end of the focus group workshop, the specific barriers to compliance with HACCP in fishery businesses were validated, and the benefits for removing those barriers in Sierra Leone fishery businesses were also envisaged. According to Kitzinger (1996), there are several uses of focus groups and in research context, it has been widely applied in developing research questionnaires, enhancing the validity of questionnaires and gaining insights into the attitudes, ideas, thoughts, opinions, understandings and beliefs of the participants involved in the focus groups activities. Another school of thought said that focus groups could be smoothly combined with various other research techniques with the aim to improve the validity and reliability of research results (Morgan, 1996). This further justifies the use of focus groups workshop in combination with convergent interviews and case interviews, incorporating findings of questionnaires and field surveys, by means of methodological triangulation by this study.

Focus groups workshop was also essential for this study because it emphasized that the result represents the true ideas, thoughts, opinions, views and understanding of those stakeholders who participated, and those stakeholders were selected from the appropriate leverage points for national fishery safety policy development. In other words, the focus group workshop participants are the national stakeholders on fishery operations and therefore the right or correct or authorized or legal people to determine the national barriers to compliance with international HACCP regulations in fishery businesses, instead of the writer being central to the entire research. There was no doubt that the focus groups workshop technique allowed the development of continuous, systematic and transparent interaction, for the very fact that the participants discussed issues that directly affect their day to day activities. Interestingly, the participants discussed with their peers, and which made them to be more transparent, open and exploratory than they might have been in a “one-to-one” interview and discussion with an interviewer or facilitator.

For this workshop, participants were requested to converge and engage in discussions from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, inclusive of 1 hour lunch, for four days, and there were six hours per day per group allowed for discussion and 4 days discussions and meetings held, a total available time of 24 hours per focus group. What is significant here is that there was adequate time to discuss the 18 barriers of which each barrier represented one full topic for discussions and the 96 sub- questions (see Table 29) in the protocol for focus groups discussions (see Appendix 5, page 331) designed specifically to assist the group adequately explore the issues involved in the research. In fact, there is no standard set number of group meetings recommended in the literature, such as saying that the group meetings or workshop should be given a certain number of hours or days (Morgan, 1996). Practically, the number of days and hours for group workshop are largely influenced by the complexity of the topic under investigation and the nature, diversity, background, experience and knowledge of the participants of the groups on the phenomenon under investigation. Furthermore, the process of triangulation used in this study is designed in such a way to achieve saturation where no more new discussions are entertained. Therefore, as in the case of the Convergent Interviewing process the focus groups workshop discussions were intended to continue until saturation, that is, until no new data was being produced or all aspects of the barriers and questions were fully covered.

During the third day of the workshop each focus group arrived at this point of saturation wherein each of the three groups had covered all the barriers developed in Stages I and II of the triangulation. Subsequently, each group presented, justified and confirmed these on the fourth day of the workshop during final validation. During the final validation on the fourth day any differences that emerged were discussed and areas leading to the differences were highlighted after several disagreements and agreements based on the experiences and understanding of the participants. Where there were ties and difficulties the author used the relevant literatures of the study that are based on sound evidence of HACCP principles including science and technology to validate through the general consensus of the participants and assistants interviewers.