New Directions for the Focus Group in Spiritual Impact Evaluation
At Eido, we want to understand spiritual impact. We care about faith-based groups transforming their beneficiaries’ personal and spiritual lives.
Documenting and measuring this transformation is therefore both a privilege and a challenge. How can we understand something that is so deeply personal–especially when spiritual changes occur slowly, and in ways that are not always fully apparent to individuals themselves? While we may never fully be aware of what occurs an individual’s spiritual life, we believe it is feasible to unpack what we call “indicators” of their spiritual journey. It is with this proviso that this article highlights the value of the focus group in understanding spiritual transformation.
Although the focus group was originally developed by social scientists, for many years it was used primarily for market research. This began to change in the 1980s, when focus groups were adopted for other research purposes, including sociological studies and medical research.[1]
Why does Eido see a special role for the focus group in evaluating spiritual impact?
Focus groups allow the participant to shape the research process
In the first place, focus groups are crucial because they allow participants to play an active role in guiding discussions. Unlike individual or group interviews, which are essentially composed of a back-and-forth between interviewer and interviewee, focus group participants are encouraged to ask their own questions and respond to comments that other participants have made. This means that conversations sometimes go in directions unanticipated by the researcher.
Although Eido believes in strong quantitative metrics, we also believe that an individual’s faith is at work in ways that surprise us. By allowing participants to take part in guiding discussions, we discover new things that their faith may be doing–trends that we can subsequently follow up with rigorous quantitative research. If we only evaluated spiritual impact on our preconceived set of metrics, we might miss the fact that an individual’s faith is not limited by our ideas of how we expect it to work (cf. Isaiah 43:19).
Focus groups don’t just tell us ‘what’, but they help us understand ‘why’
Furthermore, focus groups function as an essential complement to the type of quantitative studies mentioned above. Like other qualitative methods, they may cast light on why patterns occur: allowing respondents to freely explain their spiritual development, rather than obliging them to select from a predetermined set of responses. This is essential to replicating desirable results and avoiding unsatisfactory ones because in order to intentionally reproduce results, faith groups first need to understand why those results have arisen.
Focus groups help uncover social bias when it comes to spiritual impact
Perhaps even more interestingly, focus groups can display the gap between our self-representations and the reality of our spiritual lives. When we participate in focus groups, we may experience similar social pressures to those that are present in other group settings: e.g. small groups or church discussions. By comparing a participant’s focus group responses to interview or survey responses from the same participant, we can identify discrepancies and better understand the conversational strategies used to bridge the gap between who we are and who we would like (or feel we are expected) to be.
Fascinatingly, prophecies of the “death of the focus group” in market research have repeatedly proved inaccurate.[2] Despite assertions that the focus group is obsolete in the era of big data, both for-profit companies and academic researchers continue to rely on focus groups as an essential complement to other research strategies. We feel the same about focus groups in evaluating spiritual impact. Although focus groups should be balanced by other techniques such as surveys, statistical analyses, and individual interviews, they continue to provide unique insights on the spiritual transformation that may (or may not) be occurring in participants’ lives.
REFERENCES
[1] Richard Krueger and Mary Anne Casey, Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research, (London: SAGE, 2015).
[2] Neil Stevenson, “The Focus Group is Dead: It’s Time to Smash that Two-way Mirror and Start Again”, last modified June 6, 2016, https://medium.com/ideo-stories/the-focus-group-is-dead-24e1ec2dda82. See also Joseph Stromberg, “Focus Groups Shape What We Buy. But How Much do They Really Say about Us? Even in the Age of Big Data, Brands Can’t Quit the Focus Group”, Vox, January 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/22/18187443/focus-groups-brand-market-research.
