The New Fair Metric
The Focus Group
Why focus group?
To gather useful information regarding the topic of our research, we decided to hold focus groups. Focus groups are group interviews involving between six and twelve people who, guided by a moderator, discuss for a set amount of time¹.
Group interviews add, to the typical outcome of individual interviews, the possibility of analysing the interactions between group members, generating data from their discussions²⁻³. They therefore provide an invaluable insight into social relations and social dynamics³.
Content of our focus groups
The premise to the group interview was that the interviewees weren’t aware of the fact that we were researching about a New Fair Metric for a more equitable biodiversity offsetting. We also wanted to make sure they weren’t influenced by the fact that the starting point for our research is the HS2 project. Therefore our main aim was to be objective and gain as much objective information as possible, in order to possibly apply it to many other future cases of unsustainable development projects.
The aim of holding these focus groups was to get an insight into the interviewees’ view of three main points of interest:
1. Their personal definition of what makes a place “natural”;
2. The degree of importance they give to natural places;
3. In the event that a natural place they care about is going to be destroyed because of human interventions (e. g. the construction of a railway or other infrastructures) how would they express the emotional link they have with this place to those who are damaging it.
The three points of interest:
1. Formulating a definition of what is “natural” and what is not helps us define a key term of our study. Indeed, to develop a New Fair Metric, it is necessary to clearly define the subject we are talking about: Nature.
2. Before going further with our research, it was necessary to make sure that it was a general tendency, between our interviewees, to consider natural places and Nature itself as important. Indeed they represent the general opinion of the public, which in the end, is our major stakeholder.
3. Once stated that people would fight for, or at least make sure that their opinion is taken in consideration, in the case in which a natural place they care about is threatened by human activities, we asked them how would be the most effective way to have their voices heard. Would a survey be the best solution?
© Taylor, N. 2016. Association adviser.
Available at: http://www.associationadviser.com/index.php/tips-for-conducting-focus-groups/
Structure of the focus group
We held one focus group during April 2017 in the University of Warwick. The interviewees were students from the University who accepted voluntarily to take part in the study. One member of our research group was the moderator, who asked the questions and led the conversation, and one was the note-taker, who was external from the conversation and took notes⁴. The entire session was recorded after assuring the interviewees complete anonymity and explaining them how we would have used the information gained from the focus group.
The group interview was structured in three parts, reflecting the three main aims of the study (see the bullet points in the previous paragraph). We therefore asked two to three questions for each part of the interview. “Yes or No” questions were avoided and to get the most data from each answer, in certain circumstances the moderator encouraged the respondent to clarify or amplify the answers⁵.
The structure of the focus group followed the one suggested by Krueger et al. (2001)⁴:
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Brief Introduction: Welcome, Overview of the Topic, Ground Rules
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Questions (1st half)
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Short Break
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Questions (2nd half)
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Three Step Conclusion: Summarize with confirmation, Review purpose and ask if anything has been missed, Thanks and dismissal.
In order to keep the participants involved we asked them, in the first half of the interview, to write their answer to one question on a piece of paper. The note-taker then listed them on a whiteboard so everyone could analyse all the answers given. In the second half we asked them to rate 10 concerns about the damaging of nature (explained further in the next paragraph) as a group exercise. Those activities fostered cooperation and got them more involved than a regular interview ⁴.
Outcomes
Those places that the interviewees mainly considered as “natural”, according to their past experience, were beaches and forests close to their hometowns. They used to visit those places for leisure and relaxing activities.
When asked what makes those places “natural”, the main points were:
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They provide us with resources and vital features (ecosystem services);
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They are places to visit for leisure time, recreation and relaxation;
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They are intrinsically “beautiful”;
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There is the presence of animals and sea life;
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There is the absence of man-made structures.
In the first part, out of three, we therefore managed to obtain a definition of what makes a place “natural”.
In the second part, they generally agreed on the idea that Nature is important for both single citizens (supported by the importance they have given to their “natural” places in the first part of the interview) and for the entire community. Indeed, according to them, natural places:
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Are Important for the presence of wildlife;
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Are a break from the urbanised world;
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Give us the opportunity of relaxing in big cities.
However some argued that we could still survive without nature, since infrastructures and other kinds of institutions (e.g. education) are what we can’t live without.
In the final part of the group interview, after the short break we asked them to imagine if that “natural” place they mentioned at the beginning of the interview was going to be damaged (e. g. from the construction of a rail way, a new highway or an oil platform in the sea). Would they let the developers of the project know that they have an emotional connection with that place?
The outcome was almost unanimous, as we expected: they didn’t think that a company would take an emotional argument into serious account since “emotions are intangible” (interviewee’s opinion).
Regarding the possibility of using a survey to express their concerns about the damage that a hypothetical project would cause to a place, the main tendency was that it wouldn’t be the most effective way since people would fill it only because they have to. You also cannot “express your feelings through a survey” and “ticking boxes” would make “lose the essence of the emotional feedback” we are looking for (interviewee’s opinion).
We therefore decided to change the structure of our survey in order to make sure that the “ticking boxes” has a real meaning - filling the survey will ensure that the citizens are part of the planning process. Indeed their opinion will have an impact on the biodiversity offsetting process making it more socio-environmentally fair. We designed our survey so that, through the influence of citizens’, biodiversity offsetting will be disincentivised in the first place. They then ranked the concerns related to the damages caused to Nature by a hypothetical project. They arranged them from the one that serves their own interests the most (e.g. their economic loss) to the one that takes into consideration the environment the most (e.g. their main concern is the damages to biodiversity and wildlife).
The moderator described the concerns as follows (in alphabetical order):
The result of their arrangement (see image below) was very close to the ideal list that our research group had drafted. Indeed the final concerns (those closely linked to the environment) reflected almost exactly our view. However, the first ones weren’t in the expected order. We argue that this is due to the fact that the moderator should have explained their definitions more thoroughly (read about this and the other limitations in the following paragraph).
Concerns ranked by the focus group as of 17th March 2017
©The New Fair Metric
These are therefore our finalised categories ranked in order from the least to the most environmentally conscious:
1. Property Value / Economic Loss
2. Relocation
3. Noise
4. Visual Pollution
5. Emotional Loss
6. Cultural / Spiritual Loss
7. Deforestation
8. Air / Water Pollution
9. Biodiversity Loss
10. Climate Change
Limitations
1. We interviewed only students.
It might be considered as a limitation since it would be difficult to generalise the data coming from a student-only study to the whole population/society.
However:
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They were students from different academic backgrounds and from different academic years, which enabled us to have different points of view;
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Students are the future decision makers and active citizens that, through this study, might have had their chance of implementing their future standards of living.
2. We just did one focus group:
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Due to a lack of time and resources (we organised and developed the project in a limited amount of time; not many students accepted to voluntarily participate in the focus group);
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Even if we held another focus group, it would have been composed again by students, which wouldn’t have given us different information.
However, ours is not a research study that can eventually improve; in that case, we could lead more developed focus groups.
3. The moderator should have better defined each concern prior to the final question in the interview.
We believe that it might have lead to a list where the concerns are listed more similarly to what we expected.
References:
¹ Stewart DW., Shamdasani PN. (1990): Analysing focus group data. Focus Groups: Theory and Practice. Edited by: Shamdasani PN. Sage Publications: Newbury Park. Page 10
² Banks, J. (1957). The Group Discussion as an Interview Technique. The Sociological Review, 5(1), pp.75-84.
³ May T. (2014). Social research. 1st ed. Johanneshov: MTM. Page 137 - 147
⁴ Krueger R., Casey MA., Donner J., Kirsch S., Maack J. (2001). Social Analysis: Selected Tools and Techniques. Social Development Papers, 36, 1-62
⁵ Hoinville, G. and Jowell, R. (1987). Survey research practice. 1st ed. Aldershot: Gower. Page 101