Chapter 3: Methodology
3.3 Mini Focus Group
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mainly observing the actual face to face interaction between international volunteers and high school students, the use of the term, “intercultural,” is preferable in this research.
3.3 Mini Focus Group
Focus group is a qualitative research method commonly used in social science studies. For this method, a group of people are assembled by one, or in some cases two, moderators to discuss their opinions or beliefs on a certain subject, ranging widely from commercial products to specific concepts or individual experiences. The benefits of this method include: first, the participants are in a less hostile environment and more willing to share their ideas or motivate more discussions within the group (Krueger & Casey, 2000). Second, the moderator should strategically focus discussion on themes which are especially relevant to the research (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). Third, the method helps to collect more data efficiently in a shorter period of time.
The purpose of this focus group is to learn about participants’ experiences and try to gather more in-depth insights from participants their own words. Compared to sharing in large groups in which participants are more likely to feel uncomfortable sharing thoughts, smaller groups work better for this study, especially when participants have experience of the topic and might have more things to say (Krueger, 2014). Therefore, mini focus groups containing three (Morgan, 1997) to five (Sim & Snell, 1996) participants were chosen to interview students for this study. Each mini focus group contained both male and female students with the exception of the one in Jingmei Girls Senior High School, which all the students are female. In total, the researcher conducted five mini focus groups in class B, D, G, H and I with a sum of 18 students in four senior high schools. Detailed information can be found in Table 1. Among the list of schools,
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Taishan senior high school was the only one in which mini focus group or interviews were not practiced. On May 8, 2017, the culture lecture at Taishan senior high school was the first time the researcher joined the activity. Hoping to first observe and understand the whole process of the lecture then to determine the proper research method, mini focus group and interview were not practiced then, only participant observation was applied.
Based on this first experience, the thorough research method with mini focus groups and interviews were decided and planed for the following lectures.
Using mini focus groups is especially ideal for this research, since members within each group are classmates, who can create a more supporting and cohesive atmosphere during the interview and decrease the unsafe feeling brought by the less-familiar researcher. In addition, face to face observation on the participants can better capture non-verbal messages such as the speakers’ attitudes or behaviors. Sound recordings were made during the process.
Conducting many focus groups has the benefit of reaching data saturation, meaning some points have been repetitively addressed. Data saturation helps the researcher to elicit representative opinions, which better represent large group of people’s opinion or future predictions about the subject matter (Saumure & Given, 2008;
Sandelowski, 2008). Morgan (1997) have suggested that 3 to 6 different focus groups meeting once or multiple times would be adequate to reach data saturation or theoretical saturation.
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*The participant of a mini focus group or an interview
In order to protect interviewers, when referring them in the findings their names are replaced with code letters as in Table 1. The initial letter represents the participant’s sex, “F” for female and “M” for male. “S” stands for the students, “F” stands for the foreigners, and “T” stands for the teachers. There is no significance to the number of coding: 1, 2, 3. etc. The questions designed for discussions are for a single meeting lasting for 30 to 60 minutes right after the culture sharing lectures. Student participants either volunteered or were inquired by the teachers and agreed to join the mini focus groups.
Questions were raised in an interactive group setting where participants were free to talk
Date Teacher School Name Location Class
Mini Focus Group Student Participants
Foreigner Nationality Age Occupation
2017/5/8 FT1 Taishan Senior High School New Taipei City A (11th Grade) No MF1 Egypt 35 Businessman
2017/5/22 MT1* Municipal Datong High
School Taipei City B (10th Grade)
2017/5/24 FT2* Jingmei Girls Senior High
School Taipei City
2017/6/8 FT3* Municipal Yang Ming Senior
High School Taipei City
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informal guide during discussion to explore areas of intercultural communication. The list of questions can be seen in Table 2. There were no significant difference in answers found inTable 2: Mini Focus Group Questions
ICC Category Questions
Knowledge What is your prior knowledge of the guest speaker’s country and culture?
Intercultural Attitudes What was your attitude toward the guest speaker’s visit? Please describe with some adjectives.
Skills How much content of the guest speaker’s speech could you understand?
Intercultural Attitudes What is your feeling during the share? Please describe with some adjectives.
Knowledge What are the new things you learn about the guest speaker’s country?
Knowledge and Skills What are the most different features between Taiwan and the introduced country?
Intercultural Attitude and Knowledge
Which parts of the share do you like the most?
Intercultural Attitude, Knowledge and Skill
Will this lecture be helpful for you to better communicate with foreigners in the future?
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Does it increase your understanding of your own culture’s effect on your ideas and behaviors?
Intercultural Attitude, Knowledge, Skill and Critical Culture Awareness
After the presentation, do you change your attitude toward his/her country or culture? What are the changes?
Intercultural Attitude, Knowledge, Skill and Critical Culture Awareness
Does the share offer you a different angle of seeing the world? Please describe.
Intercultural Attitude and Knowledge
Are there any issues that you want to further explore after this share? Please describe.
Intercultural Attitude and Knowledge
Any more questions you want to ask the guest speaker?
Intercultural Attitude Do you hope to have more contacts with people from this country?
Do you have any suggestions to improve future culture lectures?
In order to find out the ideas behind the design of the presentation, students’
learning situation and students’ reaction in the presenters’ and the teachers’ eyes, interviews with the teachers and presenters were conducted in either one-on-one or two-on-one format right after the cultural sharing classes were over. Four teachers and four foreigners were interviewed as in Table 1. To make TWIYC.tw’s presumably one-time cultural sharing event more meaningful and effective, and to see better the impact on students, the founder of TWIYC.tw, Pia, was also interviewed through Skype on June 22,
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2017. These data will be supplemented material to analyze the effects of the program and changes in the students. The questions asked can be found in Table 3.
Table 3: Interview Questions
For guest speakers:
How did you design the presentation?
For teachers:
How did you prepare students for the culture share prior to the lectures?
For both guest speakers and teachers:
What are your expected behaviors or changes in students through this lecture?
What was students’ reaction like during the share from your point of view?
Do you have any suggestions to improve future shares?
For TWIYC.tw founder:
What was your motivation to establish TWIYC.tw?
What is the organization’s expectation on foreign guest speakers, high school teachers, and high school students?
How does TWIYC.tw facilitate foreign guest speakers in designing the culture shares to better improve students’ ICC?
What kind of ICC did students present in the culture shares?
Are there any plans to further improve the culture sharing project?
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Using the research method of participant observation, it means the researcher will take part in the subjects’ lives. With this practice, the subjects’ every day social behaviors can be better found and revealed (Spradley, 2016). In addition, the researcher can minimize the possibilities of imposing her own thoughts to understand the subject matter.
The aim of conducting participant observation is to record direct and detailed information during the culture sharing process in order to gain in-depth understanding of students’
behavior and thoughts. In this study, the researcher entered 10 classrooms (as seen in Table 1). The following paragraphs explain how the researcher entered classrooms and the aim of choosing this method.
The researcher first contacted TWIYC.tw and became its volunteer. She also had their agreement on researching this topic. Before actually entering each classroom, the researcher always contacted TWIYC.tw to receive contact information of school teachers.
The role of the researcher was explained clearly to the teachers as a Masters degree student researching on this project and also a TWIYC.tw volunteer helping to observe the classes, writing records and promotion materials. Some teachers might explain to their students about the extra participant in advance.
By the time of entering a class, the researcher tried to enter with the least possible disturbance. Following the class teacher’s example, the foreign speaker and the researcher always entered the classroom at the same time. The foreign speaker and the teacher walked on to the stage and quickly caught students’ attention, while the researcher usually went to the back of the classroom to find an empty seat. Sometimes the teacher introduced the researcher to the students as TWIYC.tw’s volunteer, but most of the time they did not mention the researcher and started the presentation directly. This way, the researcher