Focus Groups

In addition to semi-structured interviews, I conducted focus groups in both communities, with indigenous host members and volunteer tourists. The hallmark of

this approach is the use of group interaction to produce new information and insights (Morgan, 1997). Kitzinger (1995: 299) notes that it is a method which is:

“Particularly useful for exploring people's knowledge and experiences and can be used to examine not only what people think but how they think and why they think that way”.

Focus groups also provide an opportunity for participants to have a greater role in the research process than occurs through traditional interviews. However, I recognise that through facilitating these groups, unequal power exists between myself as the researcher and the indigenous members as the subjects of inquiry (Goss and Leinbach, 1996). Focus groups have been utilised in volunteer tourism studies on numerous occasions, with examples including McGehee and Santos’s (2005) study related to volunteer tourism and its relationship to participation in social movements, and McIntosh and Zahra’s (2009) research on volunteer tourist experiences in a Maori community in New Zealand. However, to date there is no evidence of focus groups being used to explore host community members’ interpretation and understanding of volunteer tourism. I began the focus group with indigenous members by asking some open-ended questions, through my translator, such as, ‘what do you think is the purpose of volunteer tourism?’ I then continued to ask questions based on my

emergent findings. One example of such a question would be, ‘do you think all community members benefit from volunteers being in the community?’ I found these focus groups difficult to manage, as I had to rely on my interpreter, which reduced the spontaneity through which I could instigate and facilitate the discussion. Moreover, in both the Kichwa and Tsa’chila communities, the discussion tended to be dominated by the participant with the most authority. In the Kichwa community, this was the community president, whilst in the Tsa’chila community it was the project leader. As a result, despite the best efforts of the translator and I, the focus groups became a series of monologues by individuals, rather than a synergistic process providing new insights into participant understandings of volunteer tourism. I recorded the events of a focus group in the Kichwa community in my field diary, an extract of which can be seen below:

83 Reflexive Field Diary Extract: July 1st ₂₀₁₅

“Today I held the first focus group; it did not go well. I have struggled to get participants, so the community president organised for a group of 12 people to take part. The project leader said he was too busy to participate. There was a mixture of people, some speaking Spanish other Quechua, which resulted in immediate difficulties in communication. Furthermore, the conversation was dominated by the community president, with occasional contributions by members with a particular grievance they wanted to share. Others in attendance appeared disinterested; a group of older women did not contribute and appeared to be focused on knitting. Nearby, young children played football, accidently hitting one participant with the ball.”

Figure 8. Reflexive field diary extract 2

This extract indicates the difficulty I experienced facilitating a focus group in this context. Scholars such as Kitzinger (1995) note the value of homogeneity within participants of a focus group, in order to avoid power relations, whilst Powell and Single stress (1996) that participants should be chosen in a way to avoid systematic biases. I was aware of best practice in facilitating a focus group; however, in the field I found this process difficult. In particular, community members often expressed disinterest in participating, or were unwilling to commit to a specific time. As a result, in the Kichwa community I relied on the community president to organise a time for the focus group and to invite participants, whilst in the Tsa’chila community, I relied on the leader of the volunteer project. This was necessary, as these actors had the local knowledge and contacts to encourage interest and ensure adequate participation. However, this resulted in focus groups with unequal power differentials, and participants with a clear agenda for attending. Therefore, in the Tsa’chila community, only members with a positive relation to the project were in attendance, whilst in the Kichwa community only those dissatisfied participated. These focus groups were clearly disappointing, and illustrated the difficulty in transferring theoretical best practice into the messy reality of fieldwork. My own positionality and the differential

in power and status was also visually evident within the focus group 6, as can be seen from Figure 9 below:

Figure 9. Picture unequal status during focus group. (Source: Author’s photograph)

During this focus group, I requested that myself and interpreter sit on the floor with participants to create a more non-hierarchical discussion. However, despite my request the indigenous members insisted that we had a chair to sit on. This would appear to be indicative of the unequal power between myself as a researcher, from an international institution, and the indigenous participants. This unequal dynamic also reflects indigenous members’ interactions with volunteer tourists, as discussed within Chapter Five of this thesis.

While the focus groups did not go as well as I had anticipated, they nevertheless provided valuable insight into the power dynamics and knowledge flows in the communities. Although all community members were welcome to attend the focus groups, in reality those who attended and contributed tended to be:

 Community members who had a particular interest in the project and/or who wanted to advance their own personal agenda.

 Community members who were related to or friends with, either the community President or project leader.

 Community members with the highest social status

 Community members with the confidence to express themselves in such an environment.

85 The focus groups therefore brought to the fore the heterogeneity of the indigenous communities, specifically the uneven power and unequal access to knowledge amongst community members. This provided an early insight into the importance of social networks and personal qualities to understanding community dynamics, which would become important themes in the analysis. The focus groups also provide an exemplar of the wider critiques of participatory development. They illustrate how participatory methods, even if well-intentioned, can result in domination by a community elite, to serve their interests, whilst further disenfranchising the most marginalised in society.

In response to the difficulty in creating a formal focus group in both communities, I spontaneously orchestrated a focus group in the Tsa’chila community with indigenous women who worked in the kitchen of the cultural centre. This resulted in some interesting discussions, with these participants freely discussing issues, from the rules governing their dress code in the cultural centre, to their interaction with volunteer tourists. Goss and Leinbach (1996: 119) comment that “men, and persons of higher social status, are more likely to dominate discussion, interrupt, and assume leadership and expert roles in mixed-gender discussions”. The success of this focus group corroborates this observation, with the equal status of participants appearing to encourage an informal cooperative discussion to emerge.

Five focus groups were also conducted with volunteer tourists in both the Tsa’chila and Kichwa communities. They began with myself, as the facilitator, asking open- ended questions such as ‘what is the purpose of volunteer tourism?’ These focus

groups lasted around one hour, with the nature of the groups resulting in the volunteer tourists expressing their opinion and debating in an apparently unconstrained manner. The details of the focus groups conducted can be seen in table 10 below:

Table 10 Focus group summary

Volunteer tourist

Participants Details Duration

Focus Group 1 Volunteer tourists

American University Students

1 hour Focus Group 2 Volunteer

tourists

American high school students

1 hour Focus Group 3 Volunteer

tourists

British travelling 1 hour Focus Group 4 Volunteer

tourists

British Private all girls school

1 hour Focus Group 5 Volunteer

tourists

American high school 1 hour Focus Group 6 Kichwa host

community members

Mix of people coming and going. Dominated by selected individuals pursuing own agenda.

2 hours

Focus Group 7 Tsa’chila project members

Dominated by project leader with limited input from other members

2 hours 30 minutes Focus Group 8 Tsa’chila

women kitchen staff

Interactive discussion with the indigenous women who prepare and serve food for volunteers.

45 minutes