Focus groups

At first glance, a number of the arguments that are made for the validity of using interviews to access the means by which people construct identities can also be made for the focus group method. To adapt the above statements, focus groups may also be seen as

“culturally rooted communication situations in which meanings are reinforced, challenged and negotiated between interlocutors in the ongoing interaction” (S. Taylor & Littleton, 2006, p. 28) and also that they “tell us about the cultural resources people have available for telling their patch of the world”(Wetherell, 2003, p. 13). For this reason focus groups have been described as ‘group interviews’. However, they also provide data of a different nature to individual interviews, being based on group rather than one-on-one interaction.

Therefore, in a focus group scenario, research participants have the additional role of creating an audience for one another (Kitzinger & Barbour, 1999, p. 4).

It has been be argued that being based on the interaction of a group of peers, rather than the interaction between interviewer and interviewee, focus groups more closely resemble ordinary conversation than do interviews. While the group interaction is obviously influenced by the presence of a moderator with recording equipment, who can intervene in order to elicit responses and control turn-taking, at the same time, “participants raise and shift topics, agree and disagree, select speakers and interrupt them, laugh and fall silent, in ways they would in ordinary conversation”(Myers & Macnaghten, 1999, p. 175).

The question then becomes the various ways in which focus group data gives an insight on the construction of identity within the group interaction, and to what extent this provides a different perspective than the use of individual interviews. Munday (2006) argues that focus groups provide a particularly useful tool when researching the construction of collective identity:

The focus group provides the opportunity to study how individuals jointly construct and give meaning to phenomena. Thus, the researcher is able to observe the process through which individuals construct their own realities and make sense of themselves as a group who share common values and ways of understanding themselves and their world (Munday, 2006, p. 95).

She also argues that the ability to observe interaction as it occurs is crucial “in highlighting issues around how … identity is produced, negotiated, affirmed and reinforced”.

Therefore, if the members of a focus group can agree among themselves that they are all Irish, and that being Irish means certain things, the analytical focus can be on the processes by which agreement was reached. Such processes may include how certain things were constructed as Irish, what rhetorical devices were used within the group to prioritise certain arguments, how divergent views were accommodated and/or challenged, how various members of the group positioned themselves within the discussion, what interpretative repertoires were employed etc. etc. By analysing these processes, one can gain a sense of how Irishness is constructed and re-constructed in other discussions across England on a regular basis.

Therefore, it could be put forward that the use of focus groups allows the analysis of the ways in which a shared, collective sense of Irishness is constructed, whereas the use of interviews allows analysis of the ways in which a personal and individuated sense of

Irishness is constructed and narrated (although this is not to say that there would not be a dialogic aspect to this construction). Therefore, employing both interviews and focus groups allows the ways in which an authentic Irishness is created to be traced across both the personal and the collective.

There are practical as well as theoretical reasons for employing both focus groups and interviews. Lynn Mitchell (1999) has highlighted the capacity of focus groups to silence certain voices, who might be more forthcoming in the interview setting. While this might accurately reflect the ways in which collective understandings of identity are constructed, it risks missing out on layers of meaning and explanation which might be more forthcoming in the more private environment of the interview. Similarly, in their research among older Irish migrants living in London, Leavey et al. (2004) used a combination of focus group and interview methods “in order to obtain a richer combination of information-building”. They found that the former were useful in accessing knowledge and attitudes that were unlikely to arise through individual interviews, whereas the latter

“allowed access to more personal experiences and emotive issues that may have been too sensitive and threatening to explore within a group” (Leavey et al., 2004, p. 767).

Theoretically, working on the assumption that identities are negotiated in a way that is dependent on the immediate social context through the taking up of positions and the use or rejection of shared sense-making resources, the heightened level of interaction available for analysis in focus group data may be the most suitable means of exploring this process of negotiation. However, given the argument that as well as this process of negotiation, identities also have a ‘rehearsed’ narrative component, an interview schedule which allows people the space in which to construct their own narratives, without the fear of interruption associated with focus group participation, might be the most suitable means of exploring these more personal constructions.

As outlined above, in order to fully explore the ways in which discourses of an authentic Irishness were constructed, I carried out a series of interviews, followed by group discussions, the details of which are to be found later in this chapter. In addition, in order to situate these interactions within larger social meanings of Irishness as argued above, I first engaged in activities designed to gain an understanding of what these larger social meanings might constitute, as discussed below.