 I'm speaking to you specifically from Atlanta, Georgia, which is the traditional homelands of the Muscagee Creek and Cherokee peoples. These indigenous people here were displaced through violence and governmental policies in the 1830s to make room for European settlers at that time. And I also wanna acknowledge the fact that in Atlanta specifically, this is the land of formerly enslaved populations beginning in the mid 1760s from Africa, mainly from Angola, Sierra Leone, and Gambia. I wanna also state that I am thrilled to be able to present my information to you today. And I'm happy that everyone, and thankful for everyone who played a role in making this presentation come together. So without further ado, Ava, I don't know if you're able to bring up the PowerPoint. And again, this is gonna be a stiff version, but hopefully we can bring some excitement to this conversation. So there's my introductory slide. And the next slide, I just want to share a little bit about myself and give you an overview. So here's the topics that we'll go over. I'm gonna start with some basic definitions. Then I'm gonna talk about how I think focus groups can advance cultural responsiveness. I'm gonna then go over some ways to consider focus groups in your work. And then I'm gonna do some considerations related to what do we need to think about when we work with culturally responsive focus groups. And then lastly, I will try to share a little bit about quality and ethical aspects of conducting culturally responsive focus groups. So on the next slide, I believe I share some information about myself. I'm not gonna go into that. I think Ava did a wonderful job of sharing about my work history so we can move on to the next one. And you will have a copy of these same slides. I think Ava also asked you where you are listening from so we can move to the next slide, actually. If that's okay. So here's the slide that I want to use to set the tone for our brief time together today. What I'm sharing with you is coming from a book that I wrote. This book is trying to address how to think about culturally responsive focus groups but from different cultural populations. So for example, what do I mean by that? I had a central question in my own research journey which is how can focus groups be tailored to respond to different cultural groups? Obviously I couldn't think about every single type of cultural group. The book covers youth, older adults, women of color and indigenous peoples. And again, recognizing the diversity within those groups. The point of the book is not to suggest that this is a definitive account of how you conduct focus groups with these populations. It's really intended to encourage and inspire researchers and evaluators on how to think critically and creatively when working with different cultures. So again, this is gonna be a high brow presentation, broad strokes here, but basically coming from this book. So moving to the next slide, I want to kind of set the tone for how I think about cultural responsiveness. But before I do that, I just want to acknowledge the fact that I recognize many of you have your own social justice agenda. And I recognize that there are many of you on this call. I didn't realize there would be over 70 of you. You can maybe just reflect on the social justice agenda that you have in mind. You're welcome to drop it in the chat box if you'd like. I like to have a record of that, but I do want you to keep that at the top of your mind as we go through our time together today. What is your social agenda when it comes to thinking about cultural responsiveness? If you wanna drop some notes in the chat related to that, please feel free to go ahead and do so at this time. You don't have to, I welcome you to do so if you like. So being aware of cultural perspectives other than my own, thank you for that, Jane. I really appreciate that. That's certainly some things that we're gonna discuss today. I will return to more if I see more pop up in the chat. I think it's important to go into how I think about cultural responsiveness. This is one of those topics, depending on who you ask, they're gonna come from a different orientation. So I kind of like to share how I think about cultural responsiveness. So if we go to the next slide, and I'm seeing decolonization come up and we can move on to the next slide, thank you. This is giving you a broad view of how I think about culture. The American Evaluation Association has a statement. Many of you may know this and this is where I'm drawing from. And it's just acknowledging that culture obviously is inclusive of languages, values, customs, beliefs, worldviews, ways of knowing and communicating and so much more. We know that. I also wanna point out that when I think about culture, I think about different dimensions, the traditional demographic dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion. But I also wanna point out some non-traditional ways of thinking about culture as well. I wrote a paper on hip hop culture, for example. And so when we think about culture, we can also think about groups that people form based on interests or if they're part of an organization. So again, I'm thinking about culture broadly. In terms of responsiveness, I think about this in multiple ways. Here I have three points. If you go back to the previous slide, the second circle is responsiveness. The first way I think about responsiveness, thank you, is the former. It's fine. Yeah, the one before this one. Before, before. There we go. I have a lot packed on one slide. That's quite all right. Thank you. I just wanna hit these high points here. Responsiveness has at least three characteristics that I focus on when I think about responsiveness. The first one has to do with relationships, being in relation with others. And as part of that, being productively engaged with others, we're thinking about how to examine ourselves if we're working with a research or evaluation team, and then also the people that we work with in community. I also think this is a notion of being responsive to the context in the culture, which we know will vary depending on the situation and circumstance that we're in. And I also want to knowledge that responsiveness to me has a lot to do with research or reflexivity. And what I mean by that is you cannot always predetermine what will happen in any given evaluation or research context. So we have to remain flexible and have what I call methodological adaptation to respond to things as they emerge. So I just wanna highlight, again, these are the ways in which I think about cultural responsiveness. We can move to the next slide. Thank you. The other thing that comes up a lot because I also teach about the things that I'm sharing with you, students are wondering about, well, Dr. Hall, there's so many related terms out there. There's cultural competence, there's cultural humility, and there's cultural responsiveness. And I don't even have all of the related terms on this slide. These are just the ones I picked out. And I wanna acknowledge that, yes, there are many related terms. And rather than read the definitions to you, what I just wanna say at this point is that I acknowledge that there are related terms and how I understand what's happening here is in the field of evaluation and other service fields like social work is that people are evolving, definitions are changing. And they're being more refined. So early days were cultural competence you would see in the literature that got critiqued because people understood that you can't be fully competent when it comes to culture, it's an ongoing learning process. Then people started adopting the term cultural humility to really emphasize the fact that we are in relationship with people because we also think about the health field, you see patients as part of that definition in addition to communities and colleagues. And then where I situate myself is with cultural responsiveness and that's emphasizing things like justice, empowerment and equity. So again, I think we're all striving toward the same similar goals, but to me, this is reflecting a critique from one term to the next and how the field is evolving in language but I know it can be confusing. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that we can move on to the next slide. So now I'm getting into at this point, what do we think about when we think about facilitating a focus group? So a traditional focus group is when you gather people together as we know to focus on a particular topic of interest. What is the facilitators role in that? Traditional facilitators are responsible for the things below to develop the purpose. Why are we having this focus group? Why are we conducting it? To craft a protocol, the instrument, what are the questions we're going to ask? Traditionally, we recruit people. The focus group is then moderated. You have a facilitator and then of course you analyze the results from the focus groups, right? And there's things in between we know that but traditionally that's the way that it goes. Now I would like to juxtapose that to what's the difference between traditional and then culturally responsive facilitator? So if we go to the next slide, I wanna begin to unpack the difference. So a culturally responsive facilitator does the things a traditional facilitator does. However, they also take a stance, okay? And the stance is that culture is important. The other thing the person does who is facilitating from a culturally responsive perspective is that they position themselves as a learner, which is very much distinct from traditional focus groups. They're not considering themselves the experts, they are there to learn. The other thing that makes culturally responsive focus groups slightly different is it engages reflexivity. And by that I mean questioning again what I talked about before being responsive about our assumptions, recognizing the self as interconnected, we're all in this together. So I see in here it says it's tricky to be a learner whilst taking a stance. I think that the stance of I am a learner is what I'm speaking to, right? You take a stance from a culturally responsive perspective that I'm gonna position myself as a learner. And so that opens you up to be able to hear what people are saying. So you're not talking as much, you are listening more. So when you get the data from the focus group, it would be less moderator talk and obviously more participant talk, for example. The other part is advancing a strengths-based approach. And what that means is oftentimes traditionally minoritized, stigmatized, oppressed, vulnerable people, however you want to express that are considered from a deficit perspective. What are they lacking? What do they need? And maybe that has its place, but we also wanna consider a strength-based approach. The value that people are bringing in terms of their culture, their interests, their concerns. If we move to the next slide, there are a couple of more things that distinguish culturally responsive facilitation of focus groups from traditional. This one is key, perceiving yourself as a change agent. So you're not there just to listen. You're there to also think about in community with the participants what can be done, what action can be taken. And so you really are serious about that work. The other part is constructing knowledge. You recognize that as a facilitator, your questions are driving the answers in the sense that they wouldn't be there had it not been for you calling the focus groups. Their responses are based on what you ask them. So it is very much a co-construction. And so you understand that going in, that you're a part of the process, you're not separate from. The other thing I want to briefly share is that operating with the sociocultural consciousness. Well, what does that mean? And what I simply mean by that is just that there's a very dynamic character of culture. It's not static. You have individual identities, but you also have collective identities in terms of the groups we belong to, the organizations we belong to. And culture to me is how those things interact as well. And then lastly, and I'm gonna explore this a little bit more, is when you go into your evaluation or your research, you're thinking about, are my theories appropriate for this community? Are my methods appropriate? And if they're not, what do I need to change so they are appropriate for the communities that I work with? So let's move on to the next slide. And I know I'm giving a very high level view and I'm hoping that we'll have time for questions later on. So we can go in depth with your specific thoughts and concerns around what I'm sharing today. But if we go to the evaluation tree, I just wanted to point out that there are people who have theorized evaluation and they have grouped particular theories together and they call them social justice oriented, there we go. Social justice oriented theories and methods. And it's not to say that people who are focused on cultural responsiveness, with the goal of social justice, don't care about methods, they don't care about use or values. That's not what we're saying. We're just saying that they emphasize that more. And they really want to make sure that, again, actions are taken as the result of whatever research or evaluation they're conducting. So if we go to the next slide, I just wanted to highlight that again, thinking about culture broadly, there are so many approaches when it comes to cultural responsiveness. There isn't just one cookie cutter way to think about theories or methods. These are just some, we have feminist approaches, we have equity approaches, we have indigenous approaches, for example, empowerment and many, many, many, many more. And so as a culturally responsive facilitator, it's from my perspective, you really want to think about, well, what makes sense for the group in terms of theory and method combined? It might be black feminist thought, which is an on here, for example, or something else. So moving to the next slide, I just want to think, have us think about together, well, what can focus groups really do to advance cultural responsiveness? My point is that focus groups in and of themselves are not social justice oriented. They're not inherently, necessarily socially justice oriented. It's the way again, in which the facilitator uses focus groups. So let's just take a minute to think about, well, how can focus groups be culturally responsive? So on the next slide, I have some thoughts about that. So here's how I think about this and you're welcome to disagree or add to this. If we have time for discussion, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts about this. But I think focus groups are really cool. And I think one of the things that makes focus groups cool from a culturally responsive perspective is because of the format. And I think when you have more participants than a researcher, just numerically, that helps to, it doesn't completely take the power hierarchy away, but it does help to flatten it just a bit in the sense that there are more participants than there are of you. So that's one way to think about it. Another way is focus groups can be modified in so many different ways. You can enhance them by bringing in, and I can talk about this more different activities. You can meet in different locations. You can bring food. You can make it really more comfortable. You can do them online. You can do them in person. There's just so much flexibility to make it more culturally responsive. And also, I do believe that focus groups align to this collective nature of bringing people together and having a conversation. And I do think this aligns with many participants' values, at least the ones that I work with. They feel some alignment with this approach, with this method. In terms of the data, what do you get when you run a focus group, a culturally responsive focus group? I think when you ask particular questions related to issues of power, oppression, social justice, you can get some really rich data from that. You can really understand better from their perspective, how do these systems of oppression operate? And by that, I mean sexism, racism, whatever the topic is that you're interested in. And I think it can be a powerful tool to disrupt stereotypes. Black women, like myself here in the United States anyway, are often the narrative, the meta-narrative is we're angry and we're not very friendly people. We have an attitude. This is a stereotype about black women and we're sexually promiscuous and it just goes on and on. There's a bunch of negative stereotypes about black women, for example. And in a focus group, what I like about focus groups is you can really uncover things that disrupt those meta-narratives around particular groups. And you can get clarification about what's really going on from their perspective. So again, I think that these are the reasons why I think focus groups can be culturally responsive. If we go to the next slide, I just wanna say a couple of words about, well, how can you actually use this in your design if you're designing an evaluation or a research agenda? How can this fit in? I just wanna say a couple of things here. I am not here to suggest that focus groups make sense for every situation. I don't think that. I don't think that you need to run a focus group for every type of evaluation or project that you're working on. I think you really need to think about is it even appropriate? For example, I don't think focus groups are the best option potentially if it's a very sensitive topic, right? So again, and we could talk more about that if you have questions. But I do again think they could be useful to understand things. I think they could be useful to create culturally responsive instruments. Oftentimes I've run focus groups to develop a survey. So the information I get from the focus group, I can then use that to create items in my survey that really align better with the group. I think sometimes we can start with a quantitative method, for example, and use focus groups afterwards to clarify like, oh, we did this experiment, this intervention, but things just don't seem right. Things seem a little fuzzy. Focus groups are really good for getting underneath that. And then where you place a focus group in any particular design, maybe you wanna use them to collect information about the context. If it's unfamiliar, focus groups might be a great way to find out, but what's going on in the community, folks? Tell me more about this, or maybe in the middle of your design after you collect some survey data and you wanna explore the topics that you're aware of, or maybe at the end to confirm what you've learned and you wanna run a focus group to say, here's what I've noticed and you wanna check in so they can fit in different places within your design. If we go to the next slide, in the book that I mentioned earlier, and again, I can't cover everything in an hour or less than an hour in the time that we have here, but I call this section points of consideration. And these are just some tips and things that I wanna share with you. And the tips are related to the items here on the side. Evaluation, when we think about purpose, when we think about developing a protocol, I wanna say a little bit more about who this culturally responsive facilitator is. I wanna say a little bit more about recruitment, composition, how to facilitate, what do we think about before the focus group? And if we have time quality, I'm looking at the time and so we'll see how far we get, but these are the things that are forthcoming. So here we go, let's see how far we can get. So while I do this in your head, in your mind, if you could just think about an evaluation or a project that you have in mind that you would like to use focus groups for, or maybe you already use focus groups, I don't doubt out of the 74 people here, many of you have already run focus groups. So just have something in mind. Okay, so moving on, now that you have your project in mind, here are some things that I like to share about focus groups. Okay, so cultural context, obviously, you wanna think about the context, the history, things have happened before you came on the scene, the politics of the context, all of those things are hugely important. You wanna be getting to know the community people, if there are leaders, you wanna be in touch with them to make sure you are getting in touch with people in appropriate ways. I do a lot of work in schools. So for me, it's very important to touch base with the principal and make sure she or he is okay with how I'm approaching students and faculty and staff. Also, if you have a research team, or in this case, most of you may be evaluators, how do we think about the team composition? Who's on the team? Who is the one that is going to actually conduct the focus group? Is this the proper person to do so? There are things to consider. Oftentimes when I run focus groups, I have to think about, okay, I could run the focus group, but maybe there's someone better. If I don't know the language, or if I feel like I need help with something, translation, interpreters, there's different ways to think about team composition and how to run the focus group and the purpose. This is huge and I wanna spend a little bit time on the purpose. So on the next slide, I wanna get into this discussion around thinking through, well, what is my purpose for conducting focus groups? And I wanna say this before I get into the purposes. One of the amazing things I find about focus groups is that you get what we hear in the States called a twofer. It's like a two for one. You get interview data, because you're talking to people. But the other reason why you run a focus group is because you wanna collect observational data. You are looking at group dynamics. If you're not interested in group dynamics, maybe running a focus group isn't the method that you want to employ. So you're really interested in how do these groups, or how does this particular group interact? And so you collect observational data as well. So it's a twofer, interview and observational data. So moving on to purposes, let's check out the next slide. So I was so curious about this topic about, well, why do people run culturally responsive focus groups that I did a study on it? And I looked at health research in particular. And what I found was when people claim to do culturally responsive research, here's why they claim to do it, here are their purposes. Some researchers or evaluators say they run the focus groups because they wanna explore with the participants the culture, personal, political context, okay? Other people say they wanna really collect the viewpoints and concerns of people, their perspectives, their values, okay? Other people have employed a program or an intervention and they're really running the focus groups because they wanna understand well, how did the participants receive the intervention? How did they receive the program? What are their thoughts about what happened? That's another purpose. Another purpose is to really think about the power dynamics messages that are being put forth in the organization, perhaps if you're working in an organization and you wanna understand, well, how are different people positioned within the organization? How are people feeling empowered, right? So I think that's really important which leads to the next one. I don't think we spend enough time in my personal opinion getting narratives around how people feel empowered and collecting stories around, give me some instances where you felt that you had agency here, where you felt like you had control over the situation. So culturally responsiveness is just not about focusing on, for example, well, when were you downtrodden? When were you having troubles or challenges? But also really exploring, when do you feel like you had opportunities to express yourself and collecting those empowering experiences from their perspective? And lastly, I wanna say, oftentimes researchers use focus groups because they're interested in building participants' capacity around something. So maybe they wanna build the participants' capacity around problem solving. If you're trying to work with a community, they have a water issue, for example, that's a problem. They wanna work together to solve it. So they might have a series of focus groups to problem solve, to build their capacity to look at information, to make decisions and decide on an action plan. Sometimes participants already have that knowledge. Other times, the moderator really has to train and facilitate how do we go about doing those things, examining data and so on and so forth. So again, of course, you can use any of these purposes. You can use multiple purposes, but I just wanna highlight being clear about your purpose, I think is hugely important. So moving to the next slide. Another consideration that I said I was gonna talk about was the protocol itself. Really thinking through the questions. This is hugely important because quality data relies on a quality instrument. There's an expression, garbage in, garbage out. If you have bad questions, it's gonna impact your data quality. And so I just want us to take a moment to think about how to develop a protocol. In chapter three in my book, I go in depth about these things, but for now I'm just gonna hit a couple of points. So here we go. On the next slide, format. What do I mean about that? When you create your interview protocol, the questions you're gonna ask, there are different formats that you have. You have many options. You can do a highly structured format, okay, where people get questions and everybody gets the same series of questions. If you run three focus groups, all three focus groups get the same questions. You could do a semi-structured format where you have a little bit more flexibility. You can ask questions on the fly. It's not as strict. And then of course, many people do very much unstructured where it's just more conversational. It's more free flowing, excuse me, as a format. So that's one decision to decide. What is my format for the focus group? The other thing to consider is organization. So traditionally, when you think about how do I organize my questions for my protocol? I typically advise the following. You wanna start with some sort of report building, a warm-up, an icebreaker. Why should these people talk to you if they don't know you? You wanna establish some authenticity and think of a way that's going to help them feel at ease and comfortable. And we can discuss that if we have time later. But really thinking about how can I share? Oftentimes what happened to me in the most recent focus group, for example, the students I were talking to, they were like, tell us about you. What do you like? And it may require you to be a little bit vulnerable and share a little bit about yourself. If you think about it, you're asking them to share so much about themselves. What are you gonna offer? The other thing about organization is the topics that you're gonna cover. So after you do your icebreaker introduction and everything, then comes the heart of the protocol, the main questions with the topics you wanna cover. And again, you wanna put the more pertinent issues at the top of the protocol, things that you really wanna make sure you cover. And then at the end of the protocol, you wanna make sure you have closing questions, asking perhaps to summarize significant points to make sure you've captured things properly. And you always wanna ask, is there anything else you'd like to share at the end? I always like to end my focus groups this way. The other thing is when you run a focus group, you wanna make sure you have another person there, whether it's online or in person as a note taker, it's very exhausting to run a focus group. And so having another person there can help you if you forget a question, to take notes, all of those things that come into play. And lastly, in terms of question development, I just wanna say that you wanna make sure that the questions actually cover things in a way that positions them as having value and honoring them and not as, well, what's wrong with you? Why did you do that and make things defensive? The last thing I'll say about a protocol is when you run focus groups as distinct from an individual interview, you don't get the opportunity to ask as many questions. That's what you sacrifice when you decide to use a focus group. You ask fewer questions. But why is that, Dr. Hall, I'm glad you asked because you're giving time for everyone to answer. So if people are really engaging the questions, then they're sharing, which means you have more people sharing, which means you have fewer questions. So you really have to be strategic in terms of your protocol. We can go to the next slide. So on this slide, and again, you'll get the PowerPoints, but this is a QR code. Many of you are familiar with these. If you put your phone camera on here, you would see an example of a protocol. If you can't see it, don't worry. If you can't see it, don't worry. The article that it came from and all that information is included in the PowerPoint and you will get the PowerPoint. But I did want you to have an actual example of a protocol from a culturally responsive perspective from a project that I worked on. So if you go to this example here, within the article is the full protocol we use for this project. It just happens to be with black parents and it was an obesity study. And we talked to parents about how do they prevent obesity when dealing with their children. But the point of this, again, is I wanted to offer you an example of an actual protocol that I created so you can have that. And you can look at that at your leisure. So if we wanna move to the next slide. So I just wanna say a couple of things about who this person is that's running the culturally responsive focus group. So if we go to the next slide, in terms of characteristics, so this is a person that, again, is considering themselves as a change agent. They're responsible for advancing social justice. How does that happen? It has to be embedded in the questions. So you really wanna look at your questions and say, where in these questions am I attending to things that are happening in this context? And again, that's gonna depend on the stakeholder group. And for me, I'm always most interested in the most marginalized group, which in many cases for me are children. Children are often overlooked. And so when I work in schools, oftentimes people focus on the teachers and the principals, but I wanna make sure when I run focus groups, I at least run a focus group with children, for example. The skills are very complex because you're thinking about traditional moderator skills. How do you facilitate a group in a respectful tone, addressing people how they want to be addressed, using their proper pronouns and all of those things, but also managing group dynamics, right? I have a background as a teacher that really comes into play a lot when I'm thinking about focus groups, just in terms of drawing people in who might be silent, looking at nods and things of this nature. And lastly, I just wanna say nonverbal cues. In the literature that I looked at and in my experience, people do not pay attention enough to the nonverbal. And especially for a lot of cultural groups, this means a lot when they're silent or body language, the way people respond to questions. So having a note taker in that case really becomes important because they could be capturing the nonverbal cues that are taking place as you're running the focus group. So moving to the next slide, recruitment and reciprocity. So in a traditional focus group, people go about getting participants however they decide to do so. But what I'm suggesting from a culturally responsive perspective is that you may wanna think more creatively and really go to where people are. So what this could look like, for example, is there was a group of Caribbean men and we were doing a study on prostate cancer. So sure, we could put up signs and say, hey, come and we'll have this focus group with you and they come to where we are. We could do it that way. But instead what we decided to do, we thought about, well, where are men usually at? Where could we go? The barber shop. So the focus groups were run at a barber shop. Similarly, I had a person that I know who did a study on cervical cancer and she was looking for black women to talk about cervical cancer. So she went to beauty shops and ran focus groups there because she knew she would find a group of women to talk to and she went to where they are. So I'm just saying, I'm encouraging people to think very creatively and to go where people are. Informed consent is not just doing what, in my case, is legally required, but thinking beyond that making sure people really understand why are you collecting this data? How is it gonna be used and who owns the data? And what benefits do they get from this? And I work in a school at a university that has gotten into a bad reputation with the school district because the school district felt used by the university. The researchers would just come and take, take, take from the schools and they didn't get anything out of anything the faculty did. And that was a huge issue. And so by the time I arrived on the scene, it just was a mess. So I really had to think carefully about that and what I was offering my participants. What was I offering the schools? So I just wanna encourage you in terms of reciprocity. If we go to the next slide and I see the time, oftentimes students or people in workshops ask me, well, how many people should be in a focus group? I would say a good, healthy number is six, but the literature does not give a definitive answer. When you read, it doesn't give a definitive answer in terms of exactly how many. There's no consensus. It could be anywhere from four to nine. Once we can start getting past nine, I think it becomes unruly and it's too hard to manage. How to group people? You wanna think about what's culturally responsive in terms of, well, do we put boys and girls together? For example, do we put people with different status together? I separate out administrators from teachers, from students, for example, because there would be power dynamics. Teachers wouldn't talk the same way if the principal were in the focus group, for example. And then lastly, all of this rests on understanding the cultural codes and principles that will help guide these decisions around how should you group people, okay? In terms of their identities, what makes sense? And frankly, sometimes these are just very practical decisions. You can't always determine it in an ideal way. It's sometimes it just end up being very practical. So on the next slide, very briefly, one of the things I think a lot about when I run a focus group is how to engage participants in their different abilities. I've worked with older adults. I have to think about their vision. I have to think about their mobility. Where, what am I asking them to do with children the same thing? They're not gonna sit still for very long, some of them, depending on their age. So the materials that I use, the tools needed, maybe I need to have things in bigger font. Maybe I need to have things online. Maybe I need to have things on paper. So just being attentive to what's needed for the group really does matter and make a difference when people feel welcome and appreciated and valued. And then the activity, if you do an activity, if you have them take pictures, photo elicitation is really huge now where participants go and take pictures and bring them back to the focus group and discuss it. That's fine. You can do that, for example, you can have them read a vignette and respond to the vignette. I had people show videos and participants respond to the video. But where do you place that in the focus group protocol? Does it come first in the middle or in the end? These are things that we have to think about in terms of facilitation strategies. So again, very high level discussion here. And I know I'm hitting some points that you may be familiar with, but I think the bigger point here is to really try to think through and be more intentional about how we're doing what we're doing. Moving to the next slide. These are some examples that I actually used in focus groups. I just wanted to share with you very briefly. I was working with some adults, again, going back to the obesity project. And we really wanted to understand the types of drinks. Are they sugary beverages? Are they healthy beverages? So we created this picture of different beverages and had them do an activity during the focus group to circle the things that they drink. For example, and we talked about that. And that was a really great way to get the conversation going and to give them something to do. And then for younger people, again, drawing and then having the students explain their drawing and sharing and doing things like this. So again, just encouraging creativity. The next slide. So whenever I start a focus group, I go over community guidelines because it's really important. We wanna be able to hear people. We want them to silence their phones. We wanna make sure that people know that there are no right or wrong answers. So I go over all of those things before the focus groups even commence. Sometimes if you have criteria or you have questions before the focus group is a good time to do a little short questionnaire. I often tell people, you don't wanna ask like demographic questions during a focus group. I think that's a waste of time. So if you need to know things like, how old are you, for example, or how many hamburgers did you eat? Any kind of short answer thing that you could put in a questionnaire that they could do before the focus group would be a better use of your time. You really wanna use the focus group time to go deep and ask more open-ended questions. And then lastly, I just wanna say about recordings and things not all groups feel comfortable recording. So for example, here online, I gave permission to be recorded. Some people might not want that. And so we have to be respectful of that. You may just end up taking notes and doing some other kinds of things. So I just wanted to make mention of that, that it's not always acceptable to record people. It can make them feel uncomfortable. So we wanna ask about that and make sure that that's okay. And that they understand what you're gonna do with the recording and who's gonna have access to it. So on the next slide, this is just to say, culturally safe, I noticed on the site I reviewed before I gave this talk that there's a lot of information about culturally safe. I agree with that. We wanna make people feel comfortable in non-threatening environments, whether it's in person or online. And there's a whole host of things. These two things could be topics for two hours each, if not more. But whatever the case, I think being online these days has challenged me to think about culturally responsiveness in a different way. How do we build rapport online? And then lastly, on the last slide here, how do we think about quality? Quality looks different when you're coming from a culturally responsive frame. Establishing quality has to do again with engaging your assumptions. Methodological validity has a lot more to do with it being appropriate for the group. It's not valid if it doesn't match the population you're talking to. And lastly, I'll just end by saying, what are the consequences of what you're doing for the group? Not just what do they get out of it, but what could be potential consequences? For example, if you ask questions of people and you leave the context after your work is done, they're still there. And so we don't wanna put people in jeopardy and having them to answer things that may put them in an awkward position. So really thinking through what are the consequences of what we're doing when we ask people to participate in a focus group. Because you cannot guarantee that whatever shared in the focus group won't be shared outside of the focus group. Confidentiality looks very different, which is an ethical consideration. So I will end there. I saw Ava give me the sign, so I'm gonna end there. That was the last slide. So I made it through. Well done, Jory. You really did push your way through it. Thank you very, very much. You're welcome. I think a few people want to ask a few questions. Yes. So what I might do is say that because we started three minutes late or so, we might stay on three minutes later. I can either open the floor to people and people can just ask Jory some questions so we can go through the chat. I think what I'll start off with is just leave it open and see if anybody wants to ask Jory a specific question. Can I just chime in? There are a couple of questions. So Lauren Temminghoff, she just sort of said, do you have some examples about your work, especially with respect to giving back to focus group participants? What does that look like in practice? Yes, and if I have more time, I would have used an example from an actual study that I did and gave that from the study, but I will say I'm currently, I'm gonna run a focus group tomorrow with parents at a school. The school is a small school and I asked the principal, what would be useful for you? And for the principal, she made clear that she would like to use the data for other reporting that she has to do for organizations that she's accountable to in terms of the school. She has to show what the school is doing. So I think there's no recipe. I think inquiring about what would be useful. Another way to think about this is time, your expertise. So I have offered my time, I have volunteered. Again, I work a lot in schools. I have watched children at recess time, for example, just to also learn about the context. So it serves multiple purposes, right? I'm there watching the children, spending time at the school, which the principal greatly appreciated. I offer my skills and expertise as a methodologist to get her where she needs to go. She's trying to get funding. So my report will facilitate that. I've also done very basic things. Food, for the parent focus group, we're back in person a little bit more these days. So I will be providing dinner. It will be after five o'clock. I'm providing food. So it's a whole host of things that can be done. Thanks. And just there's all. Jean Roberts has just popped a question into the chat. Jean, did you want to ask Jorah yourself? Jorah, let's turn my camera back on. Thank you so much for that, Jorah. That was really amazing. So my name is Jen. I'm based in Brisbane. I work mainly in Australia with Indigenous women and maternal and child health, but I also work a lot in Southeast Asia. And so my question is around that, like, how do you manage sort of group think and freedom to speak? How do you really let people say what they want to say if you're doing a focus group in a space where there's a high power distance in the host culture? And I work in health. And so I'm about to go and do some work in Vietnam around TB. The medical director of the lung hospital will decide who's allowed to be released from their post to come to my focus group. How can I still be a good culturally responsive and ethical focus group facilitator in situations like that? Thank you. I appreciate everything that you're sharing with us. Again, and I have a lot of humility, right? Like, I don't have all the answers. I'm sharing what I've learned over years. And one thing that happened to me similar to your case, the principal decided which teachers would come to my focus group. And I think that's where activities can be very valuable in terms of what can you do to engage the participants. So that's where having people rate things, having a story that they can respond to, to, you know, solicit their opinions and their perspectives. I think for me also, frankly, being vulnerable, which means I share with the teachers that I was once a teacher. So they understood like, yes, I work at the university now, but also I did teach once upon a time. And, you know, I know their context is different, but also I share some of the challenges that they faced. But I'm interested in knowing from their perspective what's going on here. And, you know, sharing also that, again, with the learner perspective, just that, you know, being very appreciative for what they offer and being okay if they don't. Children are funny creatures in the best way. And I had students who were so eager to share and others who just sat there and I invited them to share more and they declined. And I had to be okay with that. And so I think allowing yourself to be okay when people decline your invitation, which I don't think we talk enough about. I think that's also being responsive and that's okay. When people don't on Zoom show their face, that comes up a lot for me online. They choose not to show their video. And I would struggle with that, but I have to be okay with how they show up, how they decide to show up. I don't think I answered your question, but it's something that I've challenged with as well. Thank you, no, you definitely did. Okay, good. Yeah, and maybe just extending on from that in our virtual environment today, Megan Anderson sort of commented, but also a bit of a question about how you look at non-verbal information in an online setting, because it is a challenge and you're just touching on the, that a lot of people keep their cameras off, for example, can limit obviously the observations you're able to make. Do you have any reflections on that? Yes, my reflections are, I write those reflections in my memos and depending on like the report or the article, that then becomes part of the context. Because my genuine assessment of that is it does impact data quality and I wanna be transparent about that. I don't wanna pretend like it didn't happen. It's part of the context, right? So, and it's very important. And I may never know why someone decided not to show themselves or why a child sat in silence. I may never know that, but saying that those things happened so that you as a reader understand what was going on, I think is also important, to the, you can't put everything in a report, but to the extent that you can't put some context around, this is what was going on. I think that that's important. And Eva actually had a question before a jewelry about the publication that you've shared. And she was just curious as to in what way was that research? Why did you call it a culturally responsive evaluation, for example? The obesity one, yes, thank you. I'm just curious, what was the social justice dimension on that one jewelry? Great question, thank you for that. So, brought in again, social justice, I'm using that, that's a heavy term, and but I take a modest aim at that. In this context, it meant that in Georgia, specifically in the South, but in Georgia specifically, we have a huge obesity problem. It's a health equity issue here. And the lead researcher, the PI, the principal investigator is interested in health equity. And one of the ways we were trying to combat that from a culturally responsive aim is to talk to African-American parents, Black parents who have a high percentage of children with obesity issues about how do they see this issue and what do they think should be done about it? So that's one thing, is listening to the people who we think have this situation going on and getting their thoughts about what's going on with that and how can things be different? So I think for us, that was a social justice aim and it was culturally responsive because the team itself reflected the demographic of the people we were talking to. The team was mostly Black women, for example. And the parents ended up being a lot of Black mothers. Now, within that, I was distinct because I don't have children. And that was the thing. And you don't think about that like, oh, but it was a thing. And so I positioned myself as a learner. I said, well, you know, I was vulnerable. I said, I don't have children, but I wanna learn from you then like as another Black woman who does have children advise me on this. What are your recommendations? So it's a tricky thing, but those are some examples of how I was thinking about being culturally responsive with that study. And just on your paper, Dory, I'd just tried to access it before, but it was a pay view. I can send it. That would be wonderful. I think everybody here would be really appreciative. Thank you. I apologize about that. The journal gave us a free link and I thought it was accessible, but I'm happy to share it with the people who run this and then they can distribute the paper. That's not a problem. Brilliant, thank you. Okay, Pamela, I wanted to say thank you, Dory. It's about 11 p.m. and you've got a focus screen tonight. I've been shooting just that. Yeah. And what time is it over there, Dory? What time is it? 11 o'clock at night. Oh, so thank you for giving up your evening, which I like. That's right. To share your knowledge and expectation. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you all for having me. There's so much more I could share if we have more time, but I'm thankful for whatever you received from our time together today. Thank you so much for having me.