Performance-Based Focus Groups

Abstract

Performance-based focus groups (PBFGs) in many ways resemble other types of focus groups in that the researcher-facilitator assembles a group of people with some connection to the topic to be explored. The difference, however, is how PBFGs include performance, or the active engagement of participants’ bodies, as a mode of exploration. Such physical engagement may include activities resembling games, sculpting images with the body, and/or theatrical role-playing (Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, London/New York, Routledge, 2002). I employed PBFG to study how non-native teachers of Spanish in US schools enacted and reacted to the conflicting and contradictory ways they related to the performance of their second language identities. Through theatrical exercises, contradictions and ambivalence became visible – and dealt with – as participants performed their goals and desires for learning and teaching Spanish, the strategies they employed to become as ‘native-like’ as possible, and their feelings upon being revealed as non-native speakers. In this chapter, I use data from that study to illustrate how PBFGs based on Boal’s work function in theory and in practice and to critically consider what the incorporation of the body in PBFGs allowed in the study.