Peer Review thoughts...

For this assignment, I decided to review the article dealing with women entrepreneurs in Mauritius. The reason for this was that the research method the author used was focus groups, which is the method I chose for my SSHRC proposal. I was excited about focus groups because of the possibility of rich data (as both Luker and Knight state), and I was also aware of the difficulties of interpreting the data and ensuring that you, as the researcher, can actually say something about what you've discovered through the interviews. What is becoming increasingly clear to me is the possibility that the group dynamic (which is the part that attracted me to the method in the first place) might be an issue.

I've looked at some other articles about focus group research and methodology, and all of them state that it is very important to pick a group that's "just right" - not too heterogeneous, or else people might feel inhibited, but also not too homogenous, or else you might get the same opinions over and over again. In fact, one of the articles critiques the method pretty harshly and says that it provides data that is, basically, wrong. He says that individual interviews yielded much more reliable data than groups. I wonder if it's because the topic was more about individuals' decisions about products (market research, really), whereas focus group research is more conducive to exploring questions that have to do with group dynamics. In the case of the article I'm looking at, I'm not sure yet whether the question was right for the method, but it's definitely something for me to consider for the research proposal assignment: focus group use needs to be really carefully justified.