Give Methods A Chance

In this episode, we talk to Audrey Kobayashi about focus groups.  We draw upon her work on transnationalism, citizenship and social cohesion to discuss the power of the underutilized method, distinguish between group interviews and focus groups, and share practical tricks of the trade.

“The focus group is not a place to get a collection of information about individuals. It is about the dynamic, the process, the conversation. It is never about what any one person says.”

In this episode, we talk with Deborah Carr about life course and longitudinal studies. We draw upon her work with the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to discuss issues of measurement, sampling, and study design.

“For any researcher of life course and aging, longitudinal and prospective data are essential. If we study whole lives, but do it retrospectively – for instance, if we ask someone at age 65 to recall upon their lives – there’s a very powerful phenomenon called retrospective recall bias. People reconstruct their past in such a way that it meshes with their current conditions….your current mood taints all your prior recollections.

So, to really understand aging, you can’t just look at people at one point in time to really know what their lives are like. We need to talk to people at multiple points over time so we can see how they change as they age and to see how their experiences differ based on historical changes in the world. The important point is that you follow individuals over time so that you can really track continuity and change in their lives.”

In this episode we speak to Francesca Polletta. Francesca is a professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine. She is the author of It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics and Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Francesca has also authored many peer-review articles on social movements, democracy, and culture. Francesca joins us to discuss coding stories from online forums as a way of studying public deliberation.

“We really struggled with figuring out how to be flexible enough to capture what people what people do when they are actually telling stories, which is not to hue strictly to the formal criteria of formal storytelling. While, at the same time, not losing what makes stories interesting, which is that we know when we hear a story in conversation.”