Focus Groups and Reliability (or do you mean validity?)

Lunt and Livingston suggest that a focus group “...acts as a context that challenges, asks for elaboration, and demands examples of claims that people make. In rhetorical terms, the group acts as if conducting an inquiry, and there are, therefore, reliability checks in the operation of pragmatic norms for communication in groups” (93).

This is interesting on a number of levels. The authors appropriate the idea of focus group participants as agents of reliability. Assuming reliability is the accurate reproduction of findings in duplicate research then perhaps the authors meant to say validity, or more specifically, construct validity. Validity can be understood as a measure of representativeness of research findings outside of a controlled environment.

In this context, the authors compare focus groups to surveys, wherein it is mentioned that surveys can not provide for the same checks of reliability. How is it possible for any form of lightly structured interviewing technique to produce any form of significant reliability? It is clear that this becomes an issue of semantics, which in this case is quite apparent. It also appears to be apparent that the authors may have meant something different than they communicated.

Lunt and Livingston suggest that there “...are no such checks in survey research, which may be seen rhetorically as a highly reduced dialogue between researcher and researched” (93). If the claim relates to the truth value in participant responses, as the authors suggest, then there are indeed methods for controlling inaccurate, false, or misleading responses. Occasionally, the researcher may want to ask the same question, but reword it. This functions as a sort of double-checking, wherein respondents are tested on their focus during the survey. It is not as effective as face-to-face interrogation; however it is certainly possible.