The application of a text clustering statistical analysis to aid the interpretation of focus group interviews

Focus group interviews provide qualitative information with a richness of a human interaction but their comparability is limited by their subjective analysis. An objective lexical analysis, based on word and sentence correspondence, was used to analyse text from four group interviews and three summary reviews. Analysis of the interviews, concerning pig production and pork quality, gave 5 main contexts that contained 80% of the original text. These related to 'political', 'quality' and 'animal production', which were much broader contexts than indicated in the original questioning routes. The rural men group contributed significantly more to the political context and rural women more to the quality context data. Analysis of the summary reviews showed a simpler overall contextual structure but it depended on the reviewer. It is proposed that objective lexical analysis has a useful role to play in the interpretation of focus group interviews. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.