We do social research because we want to understand what people think, how they behave, and how their behaviour might change in different situations. We recognize that different people have different views on issues and behave differently. So, to develop products, policies, or messages that will resonate with different people we have to understand where they’re all coming from.
Focus Groups are a popular method for getting this type of insight from people, about their ideas, beliefs, and behaviours. But not all Focus Groups are created equal, and not all Focus Groups will give us good information. In particular, multicultural Focus Groups and English-language Focus Groups can be really problematic when the issue being researched can be understood or acted on differently by people based on their cultural or language background. Research methods that ignore cultural differences between people adopt a ‘culture-blind' approach and then fail to find differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds when the researchers analyse their results. These findings are inaccurate, but a surprising number of research groups adopt this approach and jump to these incorrect conclusions.
This type of culture-blind approach to Focus Groups happens when a Focus Group is held that contains a mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds, in one language (in Australia, that’s going to be English). After a group like that, the researchers typically find that ethnicity doesn't matter much in how participants think or behave and they typically find that materials or communications don't need to be in languages other than English. The problem is that the methodology itself was biased to reach that conclusion because it adopted a culture-blind approach.
Diane Hughes and Kimberly DuMont have a really interesting article in the American Journal of Community Psychology that discusses just this point. They explain that Focus Groups as a methodology were developed to get the viewpoints of people with some shared characteristics in a way that encourages them to interact with one another on the topic (Hughes & DuMont, 1993). That interaction between people in a Focus Group allows ideas and thoughts to come up that wouldn’t if the research were done one-on-one between a participant and an interviewer. They go on to explain that conducting focus groups of people who have a shared cultural background creates a space where there's rapport among participants who can bounce ideas off each other and use shared vocabulary to describe issues, behaviours, or perceptions. That gives researchers crucial insight they can use to inform the development of communications campaigns, products, or programs that will resonate with people from that cultural background. If Focus Groups are comprised of people who are unequal to one another then the people who are in the minority or in less powerful social positions have a tendency to defer to the dominant or majority group members (Hughes & DuMont, 1993). Organising Focus Groups this way makes the Focus Group itself a pointless exercise, because it has failed to create a dynamic space for meaning-making and sharing among research participants.
At CIRCA, we facilitate in-language, culturally based Focus Groups for projects. This means that we’re able to find and explore cultural differences among peoples and how products, policies, or communications can be crafted and honed to appeal to different cultural groups across multicultural Australia. One research project we did for NSW Cancer Institute of 12 Focus Groups segmented into language, gender, and age groups found that a communications campaign that was being crafted to encourage smokers to quit needed to adopt more of a relational approach to appeal to people across all cultural groups, and that if it wanted to resonate with Arabic-speaking women, for instance, a direct, clear message that was friendly, personal, and acknowledged the difficulty of quitting would be important. That was a slightly different approach than the Hindi-, Arabic-, and Vietnamese-speaking men preferred.
Learning from people about their perspectives means we have to create environments where they’ll be comfortable talking about their ideas, beliefs, and behaviours. Culturally-grounded research, not culture-blind research, creates that space and is inclusive of more than 50% of the Australian population.
Endnote: Hughes, D., DuMont, K. Using focus groups to facilitate culturally anchored research. Am J Commun Psychol 21, 775–806 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00942247