Dialogue in Focus Groups : Exploring Socially Shared Knowledge

In contrast to a vast literature that provides information and guides about focus groups as a methodological tool, this book is an introduction to understanding focus groups as analytical means exploring socially shared knowledge, e.g. social representations of AIDS, biotechnology or democracy, beliefs and lay explanations of social phenomena. The main emphasis of the book is to examine how to analyse interaction and ideas expressed in focus groups. The book considers, first, different kinds of dynamic interdependencies among participants who hold the diverse and heterogeneous positions. Second, it explores circulations of ideas and contents in focus groups. More generally, the book is concerned with

* language in real social interactions and sense-making, which are embedded in history and culture

* the ways people draw upon and transform social knowledge when they talk and think together in dialogue

* the ways people generate heterogeneous meanings in the group dynamics

* communicative activities and genres represented by different kinds of focus groups

This original approach to understanding focus groups will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in social sciences, communication studies, psychology, and language sciences.

Ivana Markova is Professor of Psychology at the University of Stirling in Scotland, UK. She is the author of Paradigms, Thought and Language (1982), Human Awareness (1987), Dialogicality and Social Representations (2003). Per Linell is a sociolinguist and Professor in the interdisciplinary graduate school of communication studies at Linkoping University, Sweden. He has published widely within the field of discourse studies, and his most recent work is The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations (2005). Michele Grossen is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Anne Salazar-Orvig is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris 3.