supporting tiriti-based curriculum delivery in mainstream early ...

and appreciative inquiry was tape recorded and transcribed. In addition I took
handwritten notes at meetings, and after these meetings wrote my impressions
which were subsequently typed. It was important that notes were taken, as the tape
recordings on two occasions were difficult to hear due to extraneous noise such as
vacuum cleaning that had occurred during the meetings.
During the data analysis stage of Case Study One and Case Study Two,
one of the themes that emerged was that of leadership, which I wanted to explore
across the cases once the research with Case Study Three was completed. The
most appropriate way to do this was with a focus group, which is discussed in the
next section.
4.3.2.3 Focus Group
A specialised form of interviewing is focus groups. Morgan (1997, p. 6)
defines focus groups “as a research technique that collects data through group
interaction on a topic determined by the researcher”. As I was interested in
following through themes that emerged when analysing the transcripts across all
three case study meetings, this type of group interview seemed ideal. Historically,
focus groups started as focused interviews conducted by Robert Merton with
American soldiers at the beginning of the Second World War, in order to
understand their attitudes and loyalty. Market researchers began to use them in the
1960s and 1970s, with community groups utilising them in the 1970s and 1980s
(Thornton & Faisandier, 1998).
Waldegrave (1999) notes that focus groups are seldom analysed
quantitatively. They generally have 6 to 12 people who share some common
characteristics. A feature of focus groups is their “explicit use of group interaction
to produce data and insights that would be less accessible without the interaction”
(Morgan, 1997, p. 2). Participants can bounce ideas off each other to enable them
to further explore and reflect upon the issues they were discussing.
However, I needed to be mindful that there are several limitations to focus
groups. One of these is that not all participants may participate equally; there is
also the possibility they may hijack the discussion onto another topic. Group
interviews capitalise on sharing and building upon the creation of new ideas but do
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