Team Task - Group Analysis Method

4.10.2.1 Positives

Familiarity. This age group is very familiar with group work activity as this is frequently used to promote skills learning within the UK national curriculum.

The majority of students were comfortable with discussing and then combining their thoughts and ideas into a collective output.

Figure 4.18 Adolescent participants taking part in Task 2 of workshop

Independent. If there was any bias due to the influence or discussions with authority figures such as the teacher or researcher in the first set of data, participants discussing their views with peers may diminish this influence.

Producing results which more accurately represented their own opinions, as opposed to what they perceived the adults wanted or expected to hear. This however does not account for the fact that certain participants may dominate the group discussion.

Focus Group. By setting up team exercises within the class workshop it created the situation of multiple mini focus groups being run simultaneously.

This proved to be a productive tactic as it made the most out of the time available with the benefits of a focus group, for example that the adolescents could build on the responses of others to develop the discussion and potentially provide insights which would not be possible from one individual.

Interaction. Use of real devices provided the students with an appreciation of the variety of issues that real users face in the day to day utilisation of the

138 technologies. This level of empathy may not have been achievable without the demonstration devices.

Standardized Output. By specifying a minimum requirement for each device analysis (three positive aspects, three negative aspects and at least one improvement for each negative), the students had a framework to base their discussions around. This meant that outputs from this activity were relatively consistent, most were presented in the form of lists or brainstorms (mind maps), see Figure 4.19 for examples.

Age. This exercise demonstrated that all of the teenagers involved were capable of providing personal assessment of the medical devices, despite their age. Considering the limited time available to introduce participants to the discipline of ergonomics and its application to medical devices, they presented insightful and empathic information.

Figure 4.19 Examples outputs from Task 2 of workshop

4.10.2.2 Limitations

Group Dynamics. Teams were formed based on the seating arrangement in the classroom, with participants working with their friends and regular groups.

This may have had a positive influence, with the ease of friendship facilitating more open conversation. However the negative consequence of this is that group dynamics in terms of dominant and quieter individuals will already be

139 established and in the short time available this may impact the contributions made to the team task. This can be likened to the effects found in focus groups where “the chemistry within the focus group has a huge effect upon the data collected” (Stanton et al. 2005).

Unused Resources. During this exercise it was evident that the persona case studies were not utilized as much as anticipated and that group discussions centred on participants’ hypothetical personal use of the devices. There was a concern during planning that if the participants’ analysis had been based on personal views then some participants may not have contributed to the team analysis as readily as they would in a situation where they were speaking on behalf of or empathizing with an anonymous fictional persona. This did not appear to hinder the task or data collection as the adolescents were not hesitant in sharing their views about the device. One possible reason for the adolescents’ ability to contribute within the group scenario was their familiarity with one another. This factor may have contributed to the good communication within the groups, enabling them to discuss their own feelings about the devices without the aid of the persona resources. However it is possible that in situations where participants do not know each other this may be more of an issue and the resources might prove to be more valuable.

Data recording. During the team tasks, participants were told to record and write down all their ideas and discussion points. One drawback to this method was that despite this instruction information was not always fully recorded.

Ideally discussions would have been audio recorded,however this was not practical in the classroom environment. For future use of this technique an independent ‘note taker’ could be appointed within each team to ensure that more of the discussion was documented.

Figure 4.20 Adolescent participants taking part in Task 2 of workshop

140 Focus Group. Whilst there were benefits of mimicking a focus group in the team exercise it was then inevitable that the method would be impacted by those negative elements experienced in traditional focus groups such as potential for bias, reliability of results, group dynamics and the representativeness of the sample population.

Facilitation. The issue of facilitation during group sessions was difficult to orchestrate and maintain consistent. Both the researcher and teachers attended all the teams to answer questions and aid their discussions.

However the time spent with each group varied depending on their requests and on their abilities. As a result there were groups within the class who were assisted more than others.