Space constraints and turn-taking : The role of furniture in focus group research

A great deal of qualitative research collects its materials through talk: interviews, focus groups and (even) ethnography are primarily based on discourses or conversations. However for many decades social scientists have used naïvely these discourses as pure data, focusing on their verbal content only (the outcome or the “what”) and paying little attention to the context of production (the process or the “how”). From the middle of the 1960s the consciousness of the context has slowly grown and many researchers have seriously begun to consider the social interaction in which research conversations (e.g. interviews) are embedded. Notwithstanding this important methodological improvement, the role of the setting is often missing even in the recent literature. In other terms too little attention is still devoted to the function played by the physical features of the setting (such as space, furniture, technology) in the production of discourses that constitute the essence of interviews and focus groups. Through some videotape excerpts the author will document the affect of furniture on turn-taking and the making of opinion leader in focus groups. The empirical evidence will then lead to formulate some practical suggestions on how to improve the quality of focus groups.