Focus groups as anticipatory methodology : A contribution from science and technology studies towards socially resilient governance

Focus group practitioners have tended to emphasize the capacity of the methodology for exploring how people think about topics that are familiar and that have some grounding in everyday experience. Less articulated in the literature is the role of focus groups as an anticipatory methodology, as a tool to research public responses in-the-making. Yet, it is this anticipatory function that underpins the use of a significant body of focus group research in public policy arenas – particularly in those areas that need to claim legitimacy though the prerogative of incorporating public opinion. In this chapter, I examine the use of focus groups as an anticipatory or ‘upstream’ method in public perception research on new science and technology. Drawing on 20 years of research by the author (and colleagues), I explore how focus groups were put to use to craft a methodology capable of articulating a contextual understanding of how people develop attitudes under conditions of unfamiliarity. Five design criteria are examined in detail: contextualization; framing; moderation; sampling; and analysis