Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured 235
ity, or the child’s home environment. The male focus groups diagnosed the
child in Case 2 as having asthma, fever, indigestion, malnutrition, or worms.
Wilson et al. (1993) acknowledge that a large number of individual interviews
make it easier to estimate the degree of error in a set of interviews.
However, they conclude that the focus groups provided valid data on the terminology
and practices related to ARI in Swaziland. Wilson and her coworkers
did, after all, have 240 respondents in their focus groups; they had data
from in-depth interviews of all categories of persons involved in treating children’s
ARI; and they had plenty of participant observation in Swaziland to
back them up.
Paul Nkwi (1996), an anthropologist at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon,
studied people’s perceptions of family planning in his country. He and
his team worked in four communities, using participant observation, in-depth
interviews, a questionnaire, and focus groups. In each community, the team
conducted nine focus groups on community development concerns, causes of
resistance to family planning, cultural and economic factors that can be used
to promote family planning, community problems with health and family
planning services, how services could be improved to meet the needs of communities,
and how much (if at all) people would pay for improved health care
services.
The focus groups, conducted in the local language of each community, lasted
from 1.5 to 2 hours and were conducted in the homes of influential men
of the communities. This helped ensure that the discussions would produce
useful information. The groups were stratified by age and sex. One group was
exclusively young men 12–19 years of age; another group was exclusively
young women of that age. Then there were male and female groups 20–35,
36–49, and 50 and over. Finally, Nkwi and his team did a single focus group
with mixed ages and sexes in each community.
The focus groups were taped and transcribed for analysis. It turned out that
the information from the focus groups duplicated much of the information
gathered by the other methods used in the study. Nkwi’s study shows clearly
the value of using several data-gathering methods in one study. When several
methods produce the same results, you can be a lot more secure in the validity
of the findings. Nkwi’s study also shows the potential for focus group interviewing
in assessing public policy issues (Paul Nkwi, personal communication).
Note two very important things about all three of these cases: (1) They
weren’t based on a focus group but on a series of groups. Each of the groups
was chosen to represent a subgroup in a factorial design, just as we saw with
experiments in chapter 4 and with survey sampling in chapter 6. (2) Each of