Who participates in focus groups? Diagnosing self-selection
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Date
2024-04-05
Authors
Boas, Taylor C.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Boas TC. Who Participates in Focus Groups? Diagnosing Self-Selection. PS: Political Science & Politics. Published online 2024:1-6. doi:10.1017/S104909652400009X
Abstract
Focus groups have become increasingly popular in political science alongside the growth in field experimental and other causal inference-oriented work in comparative politics. Yet, scholars rarely provide details about recruitment processes and descriptive statistics on focus-group participants. This situation is problematic given the likelihood of self-selection and the fact that scholars often use focus groups to pretest or refine experimental treatments or survey questionnaires. By leveraging a series of focus groups that were recruited from a pool of large-N survey respondents, this article demonstrates a method for assessing which variables drive the decision to participate. I recommend that scholars diagnose self-selection into focus groups whenever possible; that they compare participants to relevant baselines when working with samples of convenience; and that they always provide descriptive statistics and details on how focus-group members were recruited.
Description
License
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.