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The purpose of this paper is to outline the current state of political and administrative ethnography in political science and public administration before suggesting that focus groups are a useful tool in the study of governing elites. They provide an alternative way of “being there” when the rules about secrecy and access prevent participant observation. Briefly, it describes the job of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff before explaining the research design, the preparations for the focus group sessions, and the strategies used to manage the dynamics of a diverse group that included former political enemies and factional rivals.

It outlines the approach to analysis and interpretation before reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of focus groups for research into political and administrative elites.

It concludes that focus groups are a valuable tool for making tacit knowledge explicit, especially when all participants work in a shared governmental tradition.

It is the first project to use focus groups to study the political elites of Westminster systems, let alone Australian government.

This paper seeks to describe how the results of the qualitative research method of focus groups may be used as conceptual data at the onset of a research study to inform researchers regarding relevant issues for future more in‐depth quantitative study.

Seven focus group sessions with a total of 50 participants were conducted, each focus group with six to eight participants. All focus groups included the homogeneous participants of new entrants to the hospitality industry. Focus group questions were inductive and naturalistic and centered on career expectations and work‐life issues. Sessions averaged 1 hour and 15 minutes and were conducted by trained graduate students.

The paper suggests that long, unpredictable hours create both work‐related and non‐work stress. Further, there is general agreement regarding the stressors and benefits associated with working in the hospitality industry.

Limitations include the use of senior, hospitality management majors, all of whom had hospitality industry employment experience, but some of whom had fewer than 1,000 hours of such experience.

This work illustrates how focus groups may fit into a larger research study involving the hospitality industry. This work also explores the common issue, but understudied topic of work‐life balance in the hotel industry. In so doing, it provides greater understanding of the issue to researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to establish whether consumer focus groups can generate reliable data when used as a consumer research input to copy/graphic design development for retail food packaging.

Six focus groups of six consumers each (n=36) were used to assess four concept designs for a manuka honey cordial product. The focus groups were used to rank the design concepts and to generate specific consumer-driven recommendations to develop/improve each of the designs. A new version of each design was then developed using these recommendations. The eight designs (four original and four improved) were tested together, using a quantitative field experiment at a supermarket in the area from which the focus group sample was drawn.

The results showed that the focus group rankings of the four original designs were largely predictive of the outcomes of the field trial. The improved designs also consistently outperformed their original equivalents in the field trials. Very large improvements were recorded with respect to the weaker original designs.

The research only studied a single product type. However, the results demonstrate that focus group outcomes can be extended onto larger populations if the focus group sample is large enough.

These results support the use of consumer focus groups as a research input to package graphic design development.

Focus groups are used regularly in research where the applicability of their results to larger populations is assumed. This is the first research to formally test that assumption.

Pre- and post-immigration trauma and stress make refugees a particularly vulnerable group in terms of mental health and well-being. The purpose of this paper is to describe a listening project undertaken in Plymouth, UK, which sought the views of 17 service users (n=12) and staff (n=5) from four local support organisations, for people with refugee and asylum seeker status and those with diverse cultural backgrounds. Aims of the project were to expand Western-centric understandings regarding beneficial support and the promotion of good mental health and well-being in this population.

Responses were subjected to thematic analysis, co-conducted with a service user. Participants were asked about their personal understandings of mental health and well-being and what supports or hinders well-being.

The findings enabled the development of a model incorporating 10 threads which support and 9 holes that can hinder well-being.

The relatively small numbers of participants compared with the numbers of asylum seekers and refugees in Plymouth may not be fully representative of the general population in Plymouth and the UK.

Despite increasing cultural diversity within the UK population, available mental health services exist mainly as developed from a Western psychological model of mental distress and treatment. This research provides services with a more informed understanding of mental health for asylum seekers and refugees. As such it is of value towards future service design in Plymouth and the UK. Findings also contributed to a successful funding bid to set up a peer-led support project in the city.

Describes a small research project designed to assess the contribution to this process of focus group research in the context of one undergraduate unit on a Business Studies Programme. Problems with the delivery of this unit prompted a request to the Centre for Business Education Research (a small research centre within the School of Business and Finance) by the unit leader for a review and, as a consequence, the establishment of a focus group. The process of setting up and running the focus group and an assessment of its potential contribution as a supplementary source of information about the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in higher education represents the core of the paper. There were compelling reasons for choosing a focus group methodology and the results tend to confirm the validity of this choice. Nevertheless, a number of issues surfaced during the research.

Little is known about the relationship between organisations charged with the protection of vulnerable adults in England and Wales. This paper investigates adult protection1 inter‐agency relationships in the context of an adult protection framework that gave local authorities the lead role and charged other agencies with working in partnership with them. The data reported are from focus groups undertaken with members of 26 Adult Protection Committees (APCs) from England and Wales during 2005‐2006. The APCs were selected using a stratified sampling frame and 271 professionals participated. Analysis revealed that participation in the local strategic decision‐making setting of the APC was influenced by the local history of partnership working, information‐sharing, affective relationships, understanding of respective roles and a shared acknowledgement of the importance of adult protection. The implications of these findings are discussed in the light of government reviews of local discretion around adult protection systems.

Points out the challenges involved facing adults who work with teenagers aged from 12 to 18 in focus groups, given the apparently contradictory attitudes of contemporary teenagers; the solution is basically to immerse oneself in the teen world without aping it. Outlines design considerations for dynamic groups: screening, parental involvement, age and gender, race and ethnicity, size of group and length of sessions. Continues with facility considerations, how to stimulate teenagers’ creativity, and tips for establishing rapport. Identifies some alternatives to traditional qualitative research: observational research, telephone focus groups, online bulletin board focus groups, and homework assignments.

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.

The purpose is to present the results of exploratory research which analysed firm‐employee relationship strength from the employee perspective. Three main research questions were explored: What indicators should be used to measure strong firm‐employee relationships? How important do employees see relationships to be in the work environment? and how do employees define relationship strength?

Qualitative research in the form of focus groups was utilised. Four focus groups of employees from medium to large regional and national Australian companies were held in a large Australian regional city.

Employees view relationships as being very important in the work environment. The findings revealed a greater degree of consistency between employees' viewpoints about important relationship elements and non‐marketing literature. Important elements found were cooperation, empowerment, communication, attachment, shared goals and values, trust and respect. The emphasis on commitment as a key relationship indicator was not supported by the findings. The findings are summarised in a proposed model of relationship strength, positing commitment as a relationship strength outcome. Employees defined relationship strength in terms of the identified elements.

This research enables commencement of examination of the value of internal relationships through empirical examination of the proposed model.

Management is informed as to what makes the best work environment from the perspective of employees.

This paper fulfills an identified gap in the literature in relation to the ability to measure internal firm relationships. It also clarifies the confusing literature on relationship elements, and it posits a model for the empirical assessment of firm‐employee relationship strength.

This monograph seeks to summarise the key influences of a role‐based perspective on leadership when making decisions as to how organisational resources can best be deployed.

Application of new frameworks provides insight into the leadership roles executives can adopt when part of formal, informal and temporary groups within the organisation's senior management team and those parts of the organisation for which they are responsible. The methodology adopted is qualitative, focusing on application of previously developed frameworks.

Adoption of an appropriate leadership role, and the timely switch from one role to another as circumstances change, are found to facilitate improvement in the ability of executives to mobilise organisational resources, and in so doing effectively address those challenges with which the organisation is faced.

A one‐organisation intensive case study of a multinational engineering company engaged in the design, development and manufacture of rotating turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The research intent is to validate two frameworks in a different organisation of a similar demographic profile to those in which the frameworks were developed. The frameworks will require validating in organisations of different demographic profiles.

The concepts advanced, and implications discussed, provide an insight into the role‐based nature of leadership. The practical steps individual executives can take to develop their ability to adopt different leadership roles are highlighted.

This monograph is an investigation into, and study of the contribution of theory that provides insight into, the process by which executives effectively mobilise organisational resources. This differs from the original contributions to theory, which focused on methodology, data gathering and validation in contrast with the current study that is focused on practical application.