RES 728 Week 5 Focus Groups Example

When Owners Talk to Each Other: Designing Focus Groups for an Employee Ownership Study

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

RES/728: Qualitative Case Study

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The learner, the companies and the planned study are composites written for a model paper.

Week 4 planned about 15 individual interviews at each of three employee-owned firms in the Cincinnati HR leader's study. Interviews reveal individual experience, but ownership culture is also shared: it lives in what coworkers expect of one another and how they talk about the company together. This paper designs focus groups to capture that shared dimension.

Why Focus Groups Here

Morgan (1996) reviewed the uses of focus groups across the social sciences and identified their distinctive contribution as the interaction among participants, which produces data and insights less accessible without it, while noting that the group setting can also shape what individuals say. Kitzinger (1995) emphasized that focus groups reveal how people talk about a topic with peers, the language and humor they use and the norms they share or contest, which makes them well suited to studying culture.

For this study, focus groups can show how employees in each firm collectively define acting like an owner, whether they challenge each other's views of the ESOP and what they treat as normal. Those are features of culture that individual interviews capture only indirectly.

Number, Size and Composition

Each firm will host two groups: one of front-line employees and one of professional staff. At Firm C, where engineers and field technicians appear to differ, the groups divide along that line. Each group will include six to eight participants, with eight invited to allow for absences. Managers are excluded; their views come through individual interviews instead.

Krueger and Casey (2015) advise that focus groups work best when participants are similar in characteristics relevant to the topic, so they feel comfortable, while differing enough in experience to produce varied views, and that most projects need several groups per category. Homogeneous groups by role fit that advice. Six groups across three firms is fewer than ideal for saturation within each category, but the groups are one source among several in each case, and interviews supplement them.

Recruitment

Participants who were not interviewed individually are preferred, so the groups add new voices. Invitations go to all employees in each category through the liaison; the learner selects from volunteers to mix tenure and department. Participants who report to the same supervisor will be spread across groups where possible.

The Moderator Guide

The guide follows a common sequence of question types: opening, introductory, transition, key and ending questions.

Opening: "Tell us your name, what you do here and how long you've been with the company."

Introductory: "When you first heard the company was becoming employee-owned, what did people around you say?"

Transition: "Think about a regular week. Where, if anywhere, does being an owner come up?"

Key 1: "What does acting like an owner look like here? Can you give examples?"

Key 2: "What happens when someone does not act like an owner?"

Key 3: Card-ranking exercise, described below.

Ending: "Of everything we discussed, what matters most to you?" and a summary check.

The question "What happens when someone does not act like an owner?" asks the group to reveal its own rules.

The Ranking Exercise

Participants receive cards naming practices at their firm drawn from Week 3's document review, such as monthly financial meetings, the annual ESOP statement, suggestion programs, safety committees and profit-sharing bonuses. In pairs, they rank the cards by how much each makes them feel like owners, then the group discusses differences. The exercise gives quieter participants a structured way in and produces comparable data across firms.

Moderator and Assistant Roles

The learner moderates. A trained doctoral colleague serves as assistant, recording the order of speakers, nonverbal reactions, moments of agreement and dispute and notable quotations. The assistant also manages recording and consent forms. After each group, both write a short debrief.

Managing Group Dynamics

Some participants will dominate; others will defer. The moderator will invite quieter members by name after the opening round, acknowledge dominant contributions and ask for other views, and use the pair ranking to give everyone a voice. Conformity is a risk in firms with a celebrated culture; the moderator will explicitly welcome disagreement: "Some people may see this differently; we'd like to hear that too."

Confidentiality

The learner can protect recordings and transcripts, but participants hear one another. The consent form and opening statement will say so, ask participants to keep what they hear in the room and advise them to share only what they are comfortable having coworkers know. Reports will attribute quotations to groups, not individuals.

Analysis

Transcripts will be coded for content using the same codebook as interviews, so evidence can be compared. Analysis will also code interaction: agreement, disagreement, building on others' points, humor and silence after certain topics. A strong agreement that an ESOP is "just retirement," or a silence after a question about suggestion programs, is evidence about shared norms. The assistant's notes help identify who said what and how others reacted.

Piloting the Guide

The guide was tested with five employees at the printing firm used for the Week 3 pilot. The opening and introductory questions worked well, and the ranking exercise produced lively debate about whether profit-sharing bonuses or the monthly meeting mattered more. But the full guide ran almost two hours. The learner cut one transition question and limited the ranking to six cards. The pilot also showed that participants relaxed once a longtime employee told a story about the conversion, which suggests the introductory question does useful work in setting a candid tone.

How Groups Fit the Case Evidence

In each case report, focus group findings will appear alongside interview and document evidence for each protocol question. Where groups and interviews agree, confidence grows; where they differ, for instance when individuals describe strong ownership feelings in interviews but a group treats the ESOP as a benefit only, the difference becomes a question for analysis. Perhaps individuals said what they thought the researcher wanted, or perhaps group norms discourage open enthusiasm. Either answer tells something about the culture.

Comparing Firms

Because the guide and ranking exercise are identical at every firm, the six groups produce comparable data. The learner expects front-line groups at Firm A to rank information-sharing practices highest and front-line groups at Firm B to rank financial rewards highest, as P1 suggests, but will report whatever the rankings show.

Logistics

Groups meet for 90 minutes on paid time in a meeting room well away from management offices, with lunch provided. Sessions are audio recorded; video is not used, to reduce self-consciousness. Each participant receives a small thank-you gift card agreed with the firm, of the same value at every site.

Conclusion

Two homogeneous focus groups per firm, a sequenced guide with a ranking exercise, a moderator and assistant and plans for dynamics, confidentiality and analysis of interaction will capture the shared side of ownership culture that interviews miss. Week 6 adds documents and triangulation.

References

Kitzinger, J. (1995). Qualitative research: Introducing focus groups. BMJ, 311(7000), 299-302. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.311.7000.299

Krueger, R. A., & Casey, M. A. (2015). Focus groups: A practical guide for applied research (5th ed.). Sage.

Morgan, D. L. (1996). Focus groups. Annual Review of Sociology, 22, 129-152. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.22.1.129