Focus Groups in Mass Media Research

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Focus Groups in Mass Media Research

• Eric Drewski

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The world according to sound

• I chose a study from the United Kingdom conducted
  on Walkmans (I.e., MP3 Players).
• U.S. focuses on quantitative research, while
  Europe and East Asia focus on qualitative research

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Visual versus Sound

• This focused on sound epistemologies instead of
  visual epistemologies that dominate mass media
  research
• This could attribute to a pre-conceived notion
  that vision is more important in mass media
  consumption

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Sound Epistemology

• A new qualitative phenomenology is used to
  gather information of strategies in use.
• Used by implementing social meanings are
  imbedded down in individual forms of experience

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Individual Experience

• Funded experience of life (i.e., sediment
  structure of individuals experience
• This permits a dual study of the structure of
  experience together with the spectrum of
  individual habitual experience

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Individual Experience

• Example, a sub-cultural use which might focus
  upon specific types of music used in relation to
  fashion and social activities.
• The sound epistemology is interested to the mere
  fact music is listened to in everyday situations

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Significance of Sound

• The significance is that something is listened
  to and that the use of Walkman facilities an
  auditory re-prioritization of forms of urban
  experience.
• Leads to the possible framework that incorporates
  notions of space, place, time cognition (looking,
  listening, thinking, remembering)

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Continued..

• And the interpersonal within a framework
  encompassing concepts of control, management
  contingency and asymmetry.
• Focus groups, interviews, observation studies
  allow us to ask what is the personal significance
  behind these artifacts.

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Focus Groups

• The focus groups can encourage others to voice
  their opinions and share each other ideas and
  thoughts about what the mass media device means
  to them.
• Negative aspect of focus groups spiral of
  silence

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Spiral of Silence

• If everyone else in the group agrees on a idea,
  someone in a group not voice their opinion.

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Key Points

• Qualitative research versus quantitative
  research-not just different in methodologies but
  where they are conducted based on geographic
  location.
• Qualitative research truly answers the key
  questions as to what users get out of these
  devices-how to create and contribute to their
  urban journeys.

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References

• Bull, M. (2001). The world according to sound.
  New Media Society, 3(2), 179-197.