Focus Groups and Interviews

The bulk of my data collection was achieved via focus groups. This method has a 'synergistic effect' (Stewart and Shamdasani, 2014), enabling discussion and debate between participants and the researcher. This was useful for my project in that it was effective in being able to put the teenagers at ease as they were with peers, and it enabled me to spontaneously dig deeper into issues (unlike with survey responses for example). I conducted 15 specific focus groups with between two and four participants in each, totalling encounters with 39 different participants.36 _{I endeavoured not to conduct my focus groups}

in overly formal or contrived settings and instead attempted to find more informal environments or leisure settings to meet my teen participants in (as discussed in 3.2).

Being a part-time researcher, I undertook my focus groups over an extended period of nineteen months commencing in December 2014. This was also

36 _{This does not include the pre and post film discussions I had with young}

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partly due to recruitment being a drawn-out process due to logistical and practical implications and problems that arose from the focus of working with teenagers. One such issue was the reliance on responses (in terms of

communications about arrangements) from busy gatekeepers and sometimes with the young people themselves, which were not always timely or reliable. Additionally, on some occasions on arrival at a venue, teenagers were not willing to speak to me, and on other occasions they simply did not attend a rendezvous. I therefore had to be receptive and adaptable in my fieldwork, according to responsiveness and availability. These issues meant the data collection period was quite a long timeframe, ending in the summer of 2016 during school and college exam season; a factor preventing a big turnout at the last youth club I attended.

A focus group early in the process with a group of four AS Level students in a city FE college was key to honing how I communicated and facilitated

discussions with participants. The two boys (17 years old) seemed friendly with each other, as did the two girls (16 years old) with each other, but all together one of the girls was awkward and reluctant to answer much detail and the other nervously over-shared, about their home lives in particular. This latter participant inexplicably revealed excessively personal information about her family and on reflection rescinded her participation the following day (whereupon I completely redacted her responses from transcription). This particular focus group did not reveal enough relevant data from half of the group (the girls). Lessons I learned from this were:

• To establish friendship patterns (via gatekeeper) and formulate focus group accordingly.

• Make it clear that opinions should be respected and that anything that is said in the group should be treated as confidential by all.

• Do not have four together in a group as it took so long to ask every participant the same question in turn, or alternatively have more of an organic conversation (i.e. do not systematically ask the same question of every participant).

• Do not spend too long asking about family and leisure habits. • Add more questions about cinema-going behaviours for future

interviews (e.g. on in-cinema behaviour, cinema-going companions etc.).

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I next describe the general pattern that I established for the main bulk of my focus group activity. When teachers or youth workers responded to an initial approach, I asked them to identify small groups of friends in the right age group (also bearing in mind the intention to achieve an even split across the whole sample), and presented the informed consent form. At the venue, the gatekeeper would then usually approach the young people and invite them to speak to me, in a group. We would then be directed to a relatively quiet, but not too secluded space (e.g. a table in the drop-in area at a youth venue, a reading room, or a lounge). I learned early on that a little incentive for young people’s willing participation was free food, so I usually had the cinema- themed snack of popcorn in bowls on the table for them to help themselves to. I started with an introduction, telling them broadly about my research without stating too much about my intentions – in order to avoid leading responses. I would reiterate most points in the informed consent form; for example telling them that I would be recording the conversation and that they could stop it at any time, as well as the anonymization of their names. After this introduction I would give them a blank ID page, allowing them a few minutes to fill it out on their own (sometimes there was conferring between friends). The session itself would then usually take between 40 minutes and not much more than 60 minutes, depending on the responses and signs of any flagging attentions. I would have a question schedule and select from this according to the direction of the discussion. The questions were open-ended and flexible. As such the focus groups were semi-structured allowing for an organic fluency of discussion whilst also ensuring I covered the main points of my enquiry. At the end of a focus group I would always thank them, and sometimes suggest a follow-up session and/or a cinema trip.

I undertook a total of four one-to-one interviews which enabled me to get in- depth responses and thicker description than for the focus groups. This happened with two individuals at one of the youth clubs I attended. In both cases I was in a public area where youth workers were in sight. I held two other one-to-one interviews, with participants (aged 18) in café spaces.

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