Chapter 9

“It doesn’t make sense, but it actually does”

The focus group is typically defined as a form of research interview involving a group of people, facilitated by a moderator with prepared questions (Puchta and Potter 2004). The purpose of focus groups is to elicit participants’ descriptions of feelings, opinions, perceptions, and attitudes concerning the topic. As in other interviews, focus groups lend findings that rely largely on the interactional contingencies and dynamics that occur within, and yet less work has focused on their interactional features. Using conversation analysis (CA), this chapter aims to respecify focus group interaction as a locus for participants’ locally, collaboratively and sometimes incongruently accomplished actions, specifically focusing on the contingency of participants’ discussion sequences. With data examples from focus groups that were conducted with Korean teachers of English (EFL) within a teacher development program evaluation context, this chapter outlines how participants make use of diverse interactional resources in collaboratively constructing responses. This analysis helps to illuminate the major findings of the focus groups.