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The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of communicative interaction on meaning construction in three focus group interviews.

Within the framework of cultural‐historical activity theory, Bakhtin's perspectives of communicative interaction was applied to three interview cases on commercial aerospace supply chains.

These interactions are found to self‐organise without the control of any single actor. However, interventions by interviewees or the researcher affect the outcome when they create disturbances that go beyond the resilience of the established perspectives of the focus group community. The researcher's intervention or guidance is helpful in opening up reality perspectives of the community.

Focus group interviews may be difficult to control by the researcher. The potential for gathering rich data may, however, out‐weigh that.

The paper illustrates how focus group interviews enhance the richness of data collection compared to other interview methods.

This study identifies and interprets the experiences and relationships of a host community to a marine national park in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, as it transformed from a local recreation site into an international tourist destination. This chapter elaborates on an original and innovative amalgamation of qualitative methods used to collect data consisting of verbal and pictorial techniques, including focus group interviews, visitor employed photography, and an adapted Q-methodology incorporating photo-elicitation. The research design for data collection is provided as a guideline to illustrate how the study progressed through two essential parts. This study contributes to a gap in method on how to extract pictorial measures on a collective basis to systematically to produce group place meanings. Recommendations are suggested based on the challenges faced in this study. This innovative qualitative method was successful in deriving sense of place for a marine park.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors influencing manufacturing flexibility adoption and simultaneously explores some of the key issues prevailing in manufacturing flexibility adoption in Indian context. The study also stratifies critical factors for successful manufacturing flexibility adoption.

Using exploratory sequential design, a series of focus group interviews were conducted with Indian manufacturing professionals and these interviews were supplemented by 127 follow-up structured questionnaires.

Two major themes emerged from the first phase of the study – role played by some of the unexplored antecedents of manufacturing flexibility and key issues in manufacturing flexibility adoption. In the second phase, a list of factors was categorized based on their degree of importance in manufacturing flexibility adoption.

Being qualitative in nature, the study suffers from inherent risk of subjectivity associated with manufacturing practitioners. A large-scale survey and rigorous quantitative analysis would be helpful to further validate the list of factors and underlying relationships among proposed factors.

The identified list of factors and some of the key issues in manufacturing flexibility adoption can be of great help to practitioners. The stratified list of factors can be further used by academicians to develop an instrument for manufacturing flexibility adoption.

The paper identifies a set of factors that affects manufacturing flexibility adoption. It offers a basis for instrument development for manufacturing flexibility adoption and provides direction for future quantitative research in manufacturing flexibility area.

It is contended that the theory and practice of qualitative research is an integral part of a comprehensive marketing course. Both postgraduate and undergraduate students of marketing may be expected to be familiar with, and have experience of, qualitative techniques. Focus groups are arguably the most frequently employed qualitative technique, and as such are used as a starting point for the study of qualitative research. Their accepted advantages of speed, flexibility and economy, together with the rich data generated, make qualitative methods eminently suitable for student research, with its attendant limitations on time and money. A detailed practical guide to the procedures for planning, conducting and analysing focus groups is presented.

This study aims to understand the utility of personas and illustrate, through a case study, how a persona-building exercise in a Community Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) training of community leaders elicited important insights that complemented findings from ongoing formative research on vaccine hesitancy in the Hispanic/Latino population in the USA during COVID-19 pandemic.

An exploratory concurrent parallel qualitative study design compared three personas created by community-based organization members (n = 37) to transcripts from five formative research focus groups (n = 30) from the same project. All participants in this study were recruited by the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network as part of their capacity-building and formative research activities. Grounded theory guided the content analysis.

This study found personas and focus groups to be complementary. A high degree of co-occurrence was observed when investigating the uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine under the categories of barriers, culture and communication. Between the two methods, the authors found strong associations between fear, disruption to the value system, work-related barriers, inaccessibility to health care and information sources and misinformation. Areas of divergence were negligible.

While personas provided background information about the population and sharing “how” to reach the priority population, focus groups provided the “why” behind the behavior, followed by “how”.

A community-driven persona-building process built on cultural community knowledge and existing data can build community capacity, provide rich information to assist in the creation of tailored messages, strategies and overall interventions during a public health crisis and provide user-centered, evidence-based information about a priority population while researchers and practitioners wait on the results from formative research.

This case study provided a unique opportunity to analyze the complementary effectiveness of two methods acting in tandem to understand the priority population: stakeholder-informed persona-building and participant-informed focus group interviews. Understanding their complementary nature addresses a time gap that often exists between researchers and practitioners during times of crises and builds on recommendations associated with bringing rigor into practice, promoting academic contribution to real-world issues and building collaborative partnerships. Finally, it supports the utility of a nimble tool that improves social marketers’ ability to know more about their audience for intervention design when time is of the essence and formative research is ongoing.

While the literature contains plenty of theoretical models for cultural competence training of health care staff, the personnel and clinicians have seldom been asked for their views on transcultural competence. Focus group interviews that we carried out in this study showed that the main concern of the participants (interprofessional teams in Swedish psychiatry) is to understand the culturally diverse in psychiatry, rather than being culturally competent. Three major themes of the process of understanding emerged in our analyses: (1) diversity reflection (sub‐themes: reflecting on co‐existent cultural differences and similarities, moving from a one‐dimensional to a multi‐dimensional approach to cultural diversity and self‐reflection), (2) cultural knowledge and skill acquisition (generic and specific) and (3) communication (sources, discrimination). Listening to staff's learning needs may motivate greater sensitivity to the needs of their culturally diverse patients.

Although additive manufacturing (AM) has been demonstrated to have significant potential in improving spare part delivery operations and has been adopted to a degree in the aviation and automotive industries, its use in spare part production is still limited in other fields due to a variety of implementation barriers. The purpose of this article is to assess the significance of previously reported barriers in the context of the machine-building industry.

Adoption barriers are identified from the literature and formulated as hypotheses, which are verified with a set of focus group interviews consisting of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), AM service providers and quality inspection and insurance institutions. The results of the interviews are reported qualitatively, and the transcripts of the interviews are subjected to quantitative content analysis.

The article identifies distrust in quality, insufficient material and design knowledge among stakeholders and poor availability of design documentation on spare parts as the key barriers of adopting AM in the production of spare parts. The three key barriers are interconnected and training engineers to be proficient in design and material issues as well as producing high-quality design documentation will yield the highest increase in AM implementation in spare parts.

The article offers a unique approach as it investigates the subjective views of a cross-organizational group of industrial actors involved in the machine-building industry. The article contributes to the theory of digital spare parts by verifying and rejecting presented barriers of AM implementation and how they are interconnected.

This chapter examines the application of exploratory sequential mixed methods design in the context of small accommodation enterprises (i.e., home-stay). This study, therefore, discusses the exploratory sequential mixed methods of data collection and analysis and provides practical illustrations based on a study of small tourism enterprise sustainability practices in Ghana. The findings demonstrate that mixed methods overcome the weaknesses of a mono-method and offer an in-depth understanding of tourism and hospitality phenomena. In addition to providing a practical guide to emerging tourism scholars, the current study highlights the ability of mixed methods to develop emerging practitioners' skills in both qualitative and quantitative data. In conclusion, the exploratory sequential mixed methods design offers pragmatic data collection techniques that are non-existent in mono-methods. Accordingly, it is recommended for exploring research questions when there is limited information and high flexibility is needed.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a business-university collaborative research project that looked to define lower management competencies in the year 2025, specifically for complex, knowledge-intensive organizations.

The research was done together with a large local airport. Data were gathered by a team of five researchers using focus groups and interviews with 47 employees from 15 different business units. Data were analyzed using thematic and summative content analysis.

The author found that in order for employees to be effective in a learning organization, they will need to be able to switch between roles. Roles are a combination of fundamental and functional competencies. The former are relational in nature and needed to function throughout the broader organization. The latter are knowledge-related and needed to perform-specific functions.

Limitations are linked to the generalizability of the results and the fact that the research was organization centric, meaning broad societal changes that might affect individuals’ attitudes and in turn their attitude toward work were not considered. This research does, however, raise some important issues about working effectively in complex organizations and the role higher education has in preparing students.

Curricula designers in higher education can use the findings to help adapt their current approach to teaching and learning.

Most work on defining competencies for curricula development fails to delineate between fundamental and functional competencies. There is also little empirical work on how roles can be developed.

The purpose of the study is to explore the perspectives of students, teachers, and parents in using Web 2.0 technologies.

This study is based on the focus group interview data collected from two groups of students, two groups of teachers, and one group of parents in a secondary school in Hong Kong.

The findings indicate that there is no divide in terms of access to computer hardware and the Internet. However, the results suggest that there are different types and levels of usage given to such technologies. The students were found to use Web 2.0 technologies very frequently but seldom for educational purposes. The parents appeared to know less about the Web 2.0 technologies although they are more concerned about the influence of such technologies on their children's development. The teachers used Web 2.0 technologies merely for observing students' online behaviors.

Due to limited sample participants and the weakness of the focus group interview research method itself, the authors could not suggest that these findings should reflect the whole scene because it was just a reflection of a case under a specific context. In the future, more empirical studies with a larger sample and both quantitative and qualitative research methods must be needed in the future to understand the problem well.

This study attempts to contribute to the literature on home‐school connection in education for the benefit of student development. Joint efforts must be made by school and home together to ensure the positive impact of Web 2.0 technologies on students.

These typologies draw attention to the ways how parents, students and teachers make use of Web 2.0 technologies.

This paper was an original research based on focus group interview data that fulfil an identified need to study how teachers, students, and parents are using the Web 2.0 technology.