Teresa's qs

1- There seems to be many different formats for group discussions. I was wondering what type of research questions is suited for each of these methods. For instance, focus groups seem ideal to extract social construction of meaning, whereas the model of the individual in public debate is, by essence, an individualistic approach.

2- After reading Bohnsack article on group discussion and Curtin and Maier piece on journalism, maths, and self-efficacy, I wondered whether it’s better to organize more homogeneous groups (in terms of SES, race, or any key variable) when conducting focus groups so participants feel more comfortable when speaking or diverse groups are better for the process of collective meaning construction.

3- Curtin and Maier’s study is inductive. From the analysis of the focus groups’ discussions, they theorize about self-efficacy and Bandura’s social cognitive theory as the key problem of journalists´ math anxiety. Is it common in qualitative research to theorize and present a theory for the first time at the discussion section (or final part) of the study?

4- In the article about the analysis semi-structures interviews, the article describes in a very detailed way how to code the material, conduct a “consensual coding,” create cross-reference tables with frequencies, etc. I have two questions: What is the difference between this process and the intercoder reliability and classification of a classic quantitative content analysis? Also, the author makes clear that the tables with frequency of descriptions’ occurrence are not part of the results. Why? I understand that in a qualitative analysis the most important part is the interpretation but why not include the tables with frequencies as part of the results?

5-From Reader’s study, I wondered if there’s sort of a third person effect going
on. That is, editors at small sized newspapers argued that they take into account the community because the community is more interested in what’s being published in there, while at large papers, the community is a more impersonal, distant entity. Using interviews with journalists only, of course, there’s no way of demonstrating if this is occurring. Perhaps, a good follow-up study would be to interview members of the public at both small and large news markets to see if people from small communities are more interested in what is published in the paper than people from bigger communities.