QUALITATIVE METHODS
12 Group Interviews
Charlotte Halpern
Abstract
The group interview[1] is a qualitative method through which semi-structured interviews are conducted with several people at the same time. This method intends to artificially recreating a set of social interactions between a selected number of participants, for example different policy stakeholders. It is useful to various forms of policy evaluation, such as ex ante, ex post and process evaluation.
Keywords: Qualitative methods, interview, group interview, elites, plurality, constructivism, interpretivism
I. What does this method consist of?
Interviews conducted with several actors (or stakeholders) at the same time refer to a diverse set of well-known qualitative methods in social science research. Their specific use depends on the role and function they hold in a research strategy (Knott et al., 2022), as well as their properties (Duchesne, Haegel 2008). Among them, group interviews are of particular relevance for policy evaluation research. They are not to be confused with other techniques such as group discussions, focus groups and pre-tests, mainly because they do not require being tethered unto a common experience, nor for participants to share homogeneous professional and social statuses (Marier et al., 2020). In artificially creating a set of social interactions between a selected number of participants, they differ from ethnographic methods, including observations.
Group interviews are understood as a technique used in public policy research, to launch an informal group discussion with a small group of knowledgeable stakeholders and experts – also referred to as “elites” (Glas 2021) – whose contribution is thought relevant for the understanding of the issue under study, including the evaluation of a public policy programme. The added value of group interviews does not lie in the time saved by interviewing several people at the same time – this view is erroneous as group interviews require considerable preparatory work and data processing than a series of one-to-one interviews (see separate chapter on semi-structured interviews) – but in providing the opportunity to artificially generate social interactions among a diversity of stakeholders. It helps identify and make sense of a plurality of perspectives, interests, and values, as well as shedding light on contradictions and ambiguities. Following Frey and Fontana (1991, 183), group interviews « take advantage of group dynamics to produce new and additional data. In addition to the respondent-interviewer relationship, the evolving relations among group members can be a stimulus to elaboration and expression. »
Group interviews may play a decisive role in qualitative research designs in different ways. First, when introduced in an exploratory perspective in the earliest stage of the research, group interviews are particularly useful in the case of a little-studied subject, for which the sources are scarce and insufficientl