Focus group selection

The focus group has been subject to criticism in a marketing research context, with critics stating that a group of 10 or so interviewees, usually chosen haphazardly at a single location, cannot be expected to reflect the views of the whole population. However, this research is not considering a product in a marketing context and the focus groups were conducted for the entire population of regional specialist pharmacist

managers in England and Wales, with a separate focus group for each. Because focus

groups are useful for assessing complex concepts, they are ideal for researchers who wish to systematically research and include concepts via survey or experimental work (Cyr, 2016). This research also conducted a focus group with a senior cohort group from the buyer side of the pharmaceutical acute care secondary supply chain, derived from the same teams involved in the exploratory interviews for consistency and wider understanding, namely the Commercial Medicines Unit (CMU), and the Department of Health (DoH) Supplies Team, who focus on shortages.

152

These groups did not consist of randomly selected managers with limited knowledge of supply chain disruptions and shortages in medicines, rather they were the key targeted groups of operational experts involved in the operational management, policy, and contracting of the buyer side of the pharmaceutical supply chain in acute secondary care. Selecting focus group participants from natural groups of experts in a field has been successfully used in other management research, such as Kiely (1998). One of the potential criticisms of using natural groups is that the participants can often already know each other and take it for granted that topic knowledge is high and this can be difficult if a hired moderator is involved to control the group discussion. To counter this issue, and for ethical and resource constraints, the focus groups were conducted by the researcher and did not include a hired moderator.

After conducting three separate focus groups in different locations across England and Wales, the information and data collected was substantial and varied, however, repeated themes were identified. Due to the time, finance, and resource constraints of this research and the saturation of the data outcomes, a further focus group to be conducted in the Republic of Ireland was deemed beyond this research study and not critical to the data integrity due to the repeated theme outputs from the existing focus groups, in addition to reducing the complexity of the research overall (Schlesinger, Dobash and Weaver, 1992). The focus group sample size was then not predetermined, but rather dictated by theoretical saturation; that is, data collection was stopped, when no additional concepts or relationships among the concepts emerged, a technique used in other qualitative research in disruptions and crisis management by Grewal, Johnson and Sarker (2007). The data generated by qualitative methods are voluminous, and the sheer quantity of raw data needs to be organised and managed. As part of this process, the recognition of ‘sensemaking’ and a goal approach has, at its roots, pragmatism (Brinkman, 2014). Livingstone and Lunt (1994) note on this point of theoretical saturation that the criteria for selecting the number of focus groups is determined by continuing until comments and patterns began to repeat and little new material is generated.

Fern (2001) has argued that the generalisability of focus group findings, as with other research methods, depends on the scale of the sample. What the focus group does allow the researcher to do is to drill down into the details of an issue, with a group of experts’ collective knowledge producing a clearer and fuller picture, especially in a topic-based approach.

153

All the focus groups were recorded and transcribed, as were all the individual interviews, as it has the following advantages, as described by Heritage (1987):

1. It helps correct the natural limit of our memories

2. It allows more thorough examination of what people say 3. It permits repeated examination of the respondent answers 4. It opens up the data to public scrutiny

5. It therefore counters accusations of bias by researcher influence 6. It allows the data to be reused in other ways

The focus groups were included in the ethical approval process, along with the individual interviews, and focus group protocol guides, including anonymity and data integrity, participation information sheets, and consent forms were all approved, issued, and collected as part of the focus group research. Each group interview was held for approximately one-and-a-half hours, with all participants meeting the criteria for participation. The participants were told the session would be audibly recorded and subsequently transcribed by the researcher. The same focus group guide was used for each of the groups.

Each focus group followed a six step topic agenda relating back to the research question and consequent propositions in order to concentrate on the explanation of the subject under consideration:

1. Current shortage challenges 2. Supply chain disruption orientation 3. Buffering and bridging actions 4. Feedback and dynamics 5. Size and role

6. Shortage management performance

These topics not only reflected the requirement to answer the research question, but were also a distillation of the main themes identified by the collective interview results. The transcriptions from the focus groups were also uploaded into the NVivo software programme. This was to allow the management of the substantial amounts of data generated by the focus groups' transcriptions, facilitate easy extraction of quotations in the display screen, and to identify the main themes using the Word Cloud function. However, the focus group transcripts were not fragmented into nodes and categories to allow for wider participant perspectives across the group and to facilitate moving

154

from findings to actions from the group-based discussions and interactions, as recommended by Bloomberg and Volpe (2015).

The next section refers to the ethical considerations for this research, prior to data collection and analysis.