The focus group interviews

The focus group discussions (FGDs) I conducted were with the field workers and also with sero-positive women during the field work in rural and urban areas. The focus groups took place within the Support Societies and were arranged by the residents of the Support Societies with key assistance from Mutapola Voices. I worked with a core of active participants who made phone calls, arranged the scheduled interviews, and generally dealt with the logistics for the fieldwork, enabling me to facilitate the interviews. In order to

gather and generate this data, I conducted ten focus group discussions with sixty HIV- positive women from six support societies within the rural and urban areas of the Gambia. Each FGD consisted of four to six women, and lasted sixty to ninety minutes. In addition, individual in-depth interviews were conducted with ten HIV-positive women who preferred this method of inquiry because of the sensitive nature of their experience and because they felt that they were not ready to share in FGDs.

The focus group interviews with field practitioners took place in their respective offices. Participants who volunteered were from government, the ministry of health, non- governmental organisations, community health care, and HIV and violence prevention programmes across the country. During the field work in the rural areas, I was in a position to conduct five focus group discussions with these field workers. Two of the focus groups were all-male and consisted of health and social development field workers. More male than female field workers participated in the study in the rural areas because there were low levels of trained female staff in the field. In the urban centres, two of the focus groups were recruited through snowballing. I made sure that the gender representation was balanced were feasible. Feminists are concerned with power relationships between the researcher and the researched. Mkandawire-Valhmu and Stevens (2010, p.688) recommend adopting a postcolonial feminist lens, centring voices of women from the margins to speak for themselves. It is essential to use research strategies that avoid hierarchical relationships and remove power differentials between researchers and participants (Wilkinson, 1999).

Sue Wilkinson (1999) suggested that there are numerous benefits to utilising participatory focus group discussions to conduct social science research with the vulnerable ‒ in this study, HIV-positive women are considered as marginalised groups whose voices are made audible as they discuss their experiences from their vantage point. Further, Wilkinson (1999) argues that feminist researchers can use socially interactive contexts to generate a collective sense of meaning and negotiate identities through social interactions. In summary, some of the benefits of FGD, as reported by Wilkinson (1999), are captured in the points below:

 Focus groups in feminist research processes have the characteristic of creating social context and interactive processes to empower participants;

 They involve relatively non-hierarchical research relationships, a key aim of feminist and participatory research goals;

 Focus group interviews can generate new insights and collective meanings based on the interactive processes between research participants;

 The interactive nature of focus groups may trigger situations that call for action (spurring activism to advance social justice principles), as a result of feminist research (Wilkinson, 1999, pp.64-670).

Figure 11: Women engaged in a focus group. I was the facilitator.

In the figure above, participants allowed me to take the photograph as I facilitated a focus group. The interview process was an engaging one in which the participants were encouraged, with minimal interference, to explore the issues in-depth. This allowed them to take the lead, as I listened attentively to their accounts as co-researchers. To preserve their anonymity, I have disguised their images.

In this research, I was in a position to observe women working in an interactive process to define their individual and common everyday life situations and how abuse affected them as individuals living with HIV. Together they define their problems, probing each other’s reasons for holding certain views based on their personal and group experiences. Participants were encouraged to explain their experiences and this enhanced individual and group agency, by rendering audible their voices, concerns, and priorities. This is one of the numerous benefits FGDs may offer as an interactive process during a research

encounter. Opportunities were created at the end of each FGD for participants to ask questions, to seek clarification, and to add new insights, especially if they felt that there were areas that was not covered by the focus group discussion, to reflect participants’ concerns and priorities.

Figure 12: Women in a focus group discussing key aspects of their journal entries. The photograph above shows several women engaged in an FGD as they discuss their journaling experiences. Utilising a feminist participatory approach to conduct social research offered me the opportunity to capture and explore women’s daily experiences in depth, bringing out the complex interplay of socio-cultural factors and nuanced sayings, practices and norms that fuel VAW as it connects to HIV and AIDS. Using a feminist methodological approach allowed me as the researcher to prioritise their individual and group accounts and experiences. It demonstrated why Wilkinson, 1999) had documented the beneficial aspects of FGDs, which have great potential when used with women engaged in collectively constructing meaning, refuting, or validating and affirming experiences and making sense of a given phenomenon. Through these FGDs, I was in a position to identify jointly with the field workers, and also drawing from accounts of women in the study cohort, the policy and practice responses that best offered solutions to ameliorate the identified challenges which women prioritised and with which they grappled. In this way, the research offered the most relevant, contextually and culturally appropriate conclusions and recommendations.

I was able to conduct a maximum of two focus group interviews every two weeks, factoring in the necessary travel time up-country to visit Support Societies where the women who volunteered to participate in the study resided. What was evident during the FGDs was that adopting a postcolonial feminist research approach can significantly contribute to the exposure of critical information to develop our understanding of vulnerable women (hitherto considered ‘silenced’ and without agency and power). Women in my study cohort were very engaged and openly shared experiences, speaking out with in-depth understanding of their problems, and their voices were heard indeed. It is necessary to facilitate a conducive-non-hegemonic relationship to allow the research participants to respectfully interact and to bring out diversity and similarity of experiences. In my experience, FGDs do indeed advance a less hierarchal relationship (Wilkinson, 1999), although there are inherent challenges to implementing a democratic process when conducting research because of the tendency for some individuals to dominate the FGD. Participants can, however, overcome this by setting ground rules, and if the facilitator consciously ensures that all women have an equal opportunity to speak and all participants are enjoined to follow the rules.

Another difficulty is in transcribing the focus groups as participants speak simultaneously sometimes and when they do not announce their pseudonyms or chosen research numbers it is difficult to know who is speaking. Transcription of focus groups can be difficult when trying to identify the speakers and when speaker’s voice is not audible. Despite these identified limitations, I was able, conduct the interview and allow participants to take control while I moderated the process. Overall, I found focus groups to be a beneficial investigative tool with potential to advance key feminist interview principles with marginalised groups, as espoused by Wilkinson (1999) particularly when utilised in conjunction with diaries/journal entries (Seibold, 2000; Western, 2013), and in-depth individual interviews (Bryman, 2012).