Podcasting research outline and some of the challenges involved in focus

group interview data analysis and interpretation

“The data generated by qualitative methods are voluminous. I have found no way of preparing

students for the sheer mass of information they will find themselves confronted with when data

collection has ended. Sitting down to make sense out of pages of interviews and whole files of field

notes can be overwhelming. Organizing and analyzing a mountain of narrative can seem like an

impossible task.”

--Patton, 2002, p. 440

“Interpretation means attaching significance to what was found, making sense of the findings, offering

explanations, drawing conclusions extrapolating lessons, making inferences, considering meanings,

and otherwise imposing order.”

--Patton, 2002, p.480

1.Introduction
While maintaining the significance or importance of research design and the various
methods in collecting data, it is important to recognize and admit that unless data collected
are carefully and appropriately analyzed and interpreted, their potential to facilitate
explanation and understanding cannot be accomplished. In this essay, the outline of my own
study design, which applies focus group interviews, will be presented, followed by discussion
about the two challenges the researcher (I) may be confronted with in its data analysis.
Hypotheses of data collection will be raised as examples.

The two challenges are:

a. Doing coding for voluminous data

b. Interpreting interactive prospects of focus group interviews.

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2. Outline of the research study
The research study I use here in this essay is my own research study design for my
master’s degree dissertation. The research is aimed to investigate learners’ attitudes of using
podcasting on English speaking grammar and pronunciation to enhance their English
learning. All the subjects (the learners) in the study are having intensive foreign language
(English) courses offered by New Channel, one of the language training schools in mainland
China. In order to increase the learners’ exposure to English speaking environment and help
them enhance their English listening and speaking ability, they will be given podcasts on tips
of English speaking grammar and pronunciation after classes.

For the hope of getting better understanding on how learners feel about the way of
using podcasts to enhance English learning, focus groups interview will be used in this study
before and after the podcasts are given to the learners and all the interviews will be audio-
recorded for full transcription.

3. Challenge 1: Doing coding for voluminous data

As Ron McQueen and Christina Knussen have stated in their book Research Methods
for Social Science: A practical introduction, qualitative research demands an extra level of
involvement on the part of the researcher (McQueen and Knussen, 2002). By saying this,
they mean that though maybe quite rewarding, especially if the outcomes offer a slight
glimpse of the experience which was not previously comprehended, researches on social
science are rather time-consuming and demand efforts from the researchers far beyond that is
generally considered.

Challenges emerge in all the steps of conducting one research on social science from
the design of a research plan at the very beginning to the selection of samples on half way of
the research then to the collection and analysis of data and finally to the interpretation of the
results of data analysis. Though half way, the research cannot be completed without
analyzing and interpreting the data collected from the subjects, documents or other available
resources. All the findings generate on the basis of the analytical presentation of the data and
conversely all the data underpins even the subtlest part of the findings. Therefore, the
analysing and interpreting process of the data is just like the manufacturing phase of a perfect

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product, which here is a good research study.

Furthermore, focus groups can generate large amounts of very rich and dynamic data
which put more burdens on the shoulder of the researcher. The first challenges researchers
may encounter in data analysis and interpretation is unintended termination of data analysis
because of time limits or exhaustion, rather than with a feeling of having analyzed the
material sufficiently to have worked out its main structures and meanings (Kvale, 1938,
p.188). And that is the same with me.

Sometimes, the analysing process even begins while the data are being collected, like
Roger Gomm has stated, “to researchers engage in semi-structured or qualitative interviews,
most of the important analytic decisions are made while the data are being collected, and after
the data have been collected” (Gomm, 2004, p.239). And Murphy et. al have also pointed out
that data coding and analysis should be carried out alongside data collection. Preliminary
analysis of data guides ongoing decisions about strategies for future data collection (Murphy
et. al, 2004).

It cannot be truer with this research study for the reason that interaction between
interviewer and interviewees of focus group interviews accompanies the ongoing process of
the interview and adjustments are to be made by interviewer according to any possible
situation emerging during the interview. In this study, data are going to be analyzed
according to grounded theory, which has been defined as ‘theory that was derived from data,
systematically gathered and analyzed through the research process. In this method, data
collection, analysis, and eventual theory stand in close relationship to one another’ (Strauss
and Corbin, 1998, p.12). In focus group interview, the interviewer should start to analyze the
data to some degree so as to direct the discussion on the right way and prevent digression
because one of the disadvantages of focus group interview is the possibility of digression
caused by over-heated discussion between the subjects. And also in the focus group
interviews, which are consisted of several times of interviews with different groups
respectively, a spiral model of the relationship between data collection, data analysis and

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interpretation is formed. (See Figure 3.1)

DA (Figure 3.1
3
DC = Data collection

DA = Data analysis
DA
DI = Data Interpretation)
2 Data Interpretation 1

Data
analysis 1
Data
Collection 1

The whole research project using focus group interviews is consisted of several
phases, each of which represents one time of focus group interview. In every phase (i.e. each
group interview), data are collected and then coded into specific categories for analysis and
interpretation. Afterwards, the next interview is based on the results of the former interview
which means that the moderator gets deeper understanding of the topic and clearer picture of
the whole concept to be generated. This is how the researcher obtains the ultimate results of
the research project and one of the keys factors here is coding.

As shown in Figure 3.1, one necessary step in analyzing qualitative data from focus
group interviews is coding. Qualitative researchers code in order to get past the data record to
a category, and to work with all the data segments about the category. Coding aggregates
them, so the researcher can then work with them together, gaining a new cut on the data
(Richards, 2005, p.86).

All three coding approaches, namely, descriptive coding, topic coding and analytical

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coding, will be applied in the research study for sorting the data in order to store voluminous
data into different categories for further analyses and interpretation. Descriptive coding is
used to store information about the cases being studied and topic coding is used to label text
according to its subject. Analytical coding, coding that comes from interpretation and
reflection on meaning (Richards, 2005, p.94), is central to qualitative enquiry (Richards,
2005, p.88). Doing research is distinguished from merely storing information on the point
that the researcher should consider the meanings of the data in the research context and create
category that express new ideas about the data collected to gather and reflect on all the data
relevant to them. Morgan (1997) proposes three distinct ways of coding focus group data:

a. Noting whether each group discussion contains a given code

b. Noting whether each participant mentions a given code

c. Noting all mentions of a given code (i.e. across group or participants)

Using both the three coding approaches mentioned above (descriptive coding, topic
coding and analytical coding) and the three distinct ways of coding focus group data
proposed by Morgan together, it is much easier for the researcher to not only code the data
but reduce the amount of data by abandoning those deviant ones. The main steps in
eliminating deviant data are outlined in Figure 3.2.

Devia
Data collected
nt
data

Codin
g (Figure
3.2)
Deviant
Meaning
data to
ful data
be
to be
abando
analyzed
ned

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 Interpretati
on

Since focus groups generate voluminous data, data reduction becomes essential to
data analysis. As what is shown in Figure 3.2, among all the data collected from the
interviews, deviant data like repetition of exclamations expressing hesitation such as ‘um’ or
‘er’, or meaningless conversation far away from the core topic, are eliminated through
analytical coding since it doesn’t belong to any meaningful categories which are treated as
potential indicators of concepts. On the contrary, the meaningful data are analyzed and then
interpreted to indicate the key findings.

For example, if the learner A, female, 18 years’ old, replies to the moderator’s prompt
‘telling us something you like about podcasts on English pronunciation’ is as follows:

“Well, umm, I think English is quite hard, I mean, quite hard to study. And my
pronunciation is not good enough. My peers always laugh at me about that…”

Then I will code this discourse like:

Descriptive coding Female, 18 yrs, student

Topic coding Podcasts on English pronunciation
Analytical coding Deviant data

However, if the learner B, male, 19, replies to the same prompt saying:

“Though my pronunciation is poor, I like to speak English. And the podcasts on

English pronunciation helped me a lot. I listen to them everyday. It tells me the right
sounds of vowels and helps me improve my speaking English. Now not a lot of people
laugh at my pronunciation.”

The coding will be different from the former one:

Descriptive coding Male, 19 yrs, student

Topic coding Podcasts on English pronunciation
Analytical coding a. Benefit of podcasts

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 b. Positive attitude
c. Frequently listened to

In this way, deviant data which are not relevant or linked to the research target will be
eliminated in the coding phase of the data analysis thus releasing the burden of the researcher
to deal with huge amount of data. It is always easier to say than to do. Also, as the researcher,
I should cope with the possible problems of over-coding and coding inconsistency as well
and putting efforts on how to omit too much coding and how to do coder consistency test.

4. Challenge 2: Interpreting interactive prospects of focus groups

interviews
Besides coding, another challenge I may encounter in this research study is
interpreting interactive prospects of focus groups interviews. Patton (2002) states that
interpretation means attaching significance to what was found, making sense of the findings,
offering explanations, drawing conclusions extrapolating lessons, making inferences,
considering meanings, and otherwise imposing order (Patton, 2002, p480). Also Macnaghten
and Myers define “interpretation” by saying that it is always a matter of placing the particular
analysed passages within a framework of current theoretical concerns (Macnaghten and
Myers, 2004, p.75), and the framework here in this study should be within a group context
since it is done in groups. Conversation analysis assumes that it is fundamentally through
interaction that participants build social context – indeed, it is often explicitly referred to as
the study of ‘talk-in-interaction’. It therefore seems extraordinary that focus group
researchers looking for a way to analyze the key feature of their data, i.e. interaction between
participants, have not more extensively utilized this approach (Wilkinson, 2004, p.183).

Most analyses done by researchers are done by conversation analysis or discourse

analysis, however, interaction between group members has seldom been focused on so far. It
must be noted that describing the data collected or even the data coded into specific
categories cannot be regarded as data interpretation.

Interpretation is much more than just saying what is happening on the surface, let
alone the interpretation of data generated from focus group interviews. Kitzinger and Barbour

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point out the two unique features of focus groups, i.e. collective activity and explicit use of
group interaction to generate data (Kitzinger and Barbour, 1999, p4). Another point has been
made by Morgan (1988) that focus groups are characterized by ‘the explicit use of group
interaction to produce data and insights that would be less accessible without the interaction
found in a group’. All of them lay emphasis on the interactive feature of focus groups
interview which should be paid attention to when the data collected are interpreted.

Therefore, good researcher should be capable to explain how concepts are formulated
through group context within which interaction between individuals emerges. This means that
the researcher needs to reference the group context, starting from an analysis of groups rather
than individuals and striking a balance between looking at the picture provided by the group
as a whole and recognizing the operation of individual ‘voice’ within it (Kitzinger and
Barbour, 1999, p.16). Thus, the target of the researcher in this research study should be on
how common knowledge comes shape in group interaction, say, to what extent they agree
with other subjects’ positive or negative attitudes towards using podcasts to enhance English
speaking, rather than what the content of that knowledge is, say, how many times one specific
item such as ‘pronunciation’ or ‘grammar’ appears during the interview.

For example, if one subject in the research says that he likes the podcasts about the
tips on how to develop oral English speech because the podcasts is not only providing useful
tips but convenient to listen to and subscribe as well, and other students agree with him by
raising their own experience as supporting evidence, it is easy to generalize the idea that
convenience to listen to and to subscription may be one of the factors influencing subjects’
preference on such podcasts according to the fact that some but not only a few of the subjects
has such feelings in common. On the other hand, if others undermine the point raised by the
former speaker in focus group interview, the researcher is responsible of investigating why
the situation occurs and for what reason the subjects cannot reach a consensus on that point.

Here in this study, cut-and-paste method is useful. First the researcher (I) will take
down the notes when there is interaction between subjects during the interview and mark the
specific time when it happens. These notes should then be added into the transcription paper
or e-version of the transcription for further data analysis and interpretation. All the positive or
negative attitudes about one idea then are marked with one specific colour and cut and paste
into another file. Thus, with all the conversation relevant to one idea, the researcher will see

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more and deeper how one concept is generated within group context.

The former example shows only one small fraction of the heavy load of work in
interpreting focus groups interviews. In real research, the researcher may feel much more
burdensome when facing heated discussion between group members and trying to put down
their action, reaction and interaction to words.

5. Conclusion
Doing research is dialectic, not linear process. Researchers first learn something
through data collection and then try to make sense out of it, and then they collect more data to
see if the interpretation make sense in light of further data collection and analysis, and then
refine the interpretation. This process will keep going till the concepts are generalized. In
studies using focus group interviews, one of the challenges is coding the data because data
generated during the interviews are of great amount; while the other challenge is interpreting
the interactive feature of the interviews which is the key to focus group interviews. Facing the
first challenge, the researcher could code the data into specific categories and eliminate those
deviant ones so as to prevent digression. When facing the second challenge, the interactive
feature should not be ignored and cut-and-paste method is useful for getting relevant
information together for investigating how concepts are generalized within the group context.

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