The play-doh community map (picture offered by Eleonore) instantly made me think about the board game ‘Cranium.’ In one of the categories a teammate constructs something with clay so that the other teammate can guess what it is. What is clear to one person is (very likely) confounding to the next. Granted, it’s within a short time limit, but it got me thinking about communication gaps and group contexts.
When someone feels they are under fire in a group interview, they will more than likely end up speaking the particular community language of the group, or what they think is proper in that setting. There can also be inequalities of representation between group members, in addition to miscommunications and misunderstandings. The Lunt and Livingston reading suggests that familiarity between members of the group can result in a more open group culture and therefore more substantive results.
Given the scope of our research, I may end up conducting one-on-one interviews regardless. At the cost of reliability and pertinence of the data (which will hopefully be covered in a separate quantitative data portion), I believe that in such interviews, people may give more complete and honest responses. This method could also sidestep the issues of arbitrarily mixing subjects into homogenous groups and then generalizing group opinions.
-Martin
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