Focus Groups and the New Public Opinion Infrastructure

• In Event: Media Effects on Public Opinion

Abstract

What role do focus groups and the analysis of focus groups play in the way public opinion is framed and the political "horse race" is constructed in contemporary politics? While they are far from a new research method for the development of political strategy (being particularly associated with the New Democrat and New Labour projects in the 1990s in the United States and the United Kingdom respectively - see Gould, 1998), focus groups are now increasingly covered by journalists and even commissioned by news organisations as the basis for the reporting of politics.

However, unlike traditional representative sample surveys, guidance for reporting focus groups from pollsters or media organisations is much more limited (for an example of some guidance currently in operation, see BBC News, 2024). Therefore this paper asks how are the conversations in focus groups reported, and what claims are made based on the data-gathered from them? How often are they used to make pseudo-quantitative assertatons, or partisan political talking points? In order to address these questions, this paper undertakes a text analysis of nearly 14,000 references to focus groups to have appeared in the national British press between the January 1984 and the present. Using this dataset, I will be able to map the transition from the focus groups as something undertaken by political parties and only discussed secondhand by journalists (often in the context of a direct quote from a party political operative or alternatively, more generally, as a signifier of modernisation within a political party), into a form of public opinion research which is covered more directly and closely linked to particular political analysis and narratives.

Theoretically, this paper draws on the work of Susan Herbst, and particularly the idea of public opinion infrastructures (1993). Herbst argues that the idea of public opinion is constructed through a combination of the idea of what public opinion consists of, the measurement tools available for understanding and the media coverage that these measurements generate. The core theoretical argument of this paper is that, taking focus groups as an empirical example, we are entering an era of a new public opinion infrastructure. I term this period the post-Gallupian model of public opinion research and reporting, in that it differs from the earlier public opinion infrastructures, particularly those with their roots in the mid-twentieth century. The primary characteristic of the post-Gallupian public opinion infrastructure is the diversity of methods used, including qualitiative approaches (such as focus groups), big data (for example social media analysis - see Anstead and O'Loughlin, 2015), and a growing recognition of the role played by institutions in generating election outcomes (and, by extension, methodological developments designed to accomodate this, including increased use of state / constituency level polling and mulitlevel regression polling with post-stratification, known as MRP polls).

However - as the example of focus group reporting used in this paper will examine - it is questionable whether media coverage has caught up with these methodological developments. While the diversity of methods employed might be post-Gallupian, the analysis, language and claims made of focus group data in much media coverage remains firmly locked into a Gallupian paradigm more suitable for traditional opinion polling.

Short Bibliography

Anstead, N. & O’Loughlin, B. (2015) Social media analysis and public opinion: The 2010 UK general election. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 20, 204-220.
BBC News (2024) Guidance: Opinion polls, surveys, questionnaires, votes and ‘straw polls’. BBC News (https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidance/surveys#focusgroupsandpanels [accessed on 12th January 2024]).
Gould, P. (1998) The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party. Little Brown, London.
Herbst, S. (1993) Numbered voices : how opinion polling has shaped American politics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London.

Author

• Nick Anstead, London School of Economics