Full Circle Associates

No synthesis or good "tracking down" of sources here, but I wanted to capture this post of danah's via Dina (that has a nice ring to it) as I think there are implications far beyond online focus groups. Alas, I'm running too fast for my own good to do the synthesis.

Conversations with Dina:

"danah shares her experiences of participating in a digital focus group, where she misses the nuances, the colour, the tone and gestures ....

'We were all assigned random logins. This meant that no one took the time to personalize them and thus, there were a lot of little AIM men talking. Because i was using iChat, i couldn't differentiate the AIM men and i found this consistently confusing. Nothing was known of the participants, although aspects of their interests and values emerged through conversation. Of course, the problem was that i couldn't differentiate the speakers so i'd learn something about one AIM man and not know how to connect it back to that AIM man when the s/he spoke again. Very confusing. Thus, i tried not to model gender or other attributes in my head and just stick to text, line by line. This made it feel very un-focus group-y."

Dina also points to these (old?) sites:

• Summary of Process for Conducting an Online Focus Group, US National Institutes of Health
  
• Designing and Conducting Virtual Focus Groups
  Author: Casey Sweet, from www.focusgroupsonline.net, Dec 1999