Using focus groups and a documentary method to operationalize ethnic identity in research on minority populations

In: SAGE Research Methods. Cases

Abstract

This case study illustrates how a documentary method of analyzing qualitative data can help overcome a methodological issue often encountered when researching the relationship between ethnic identities and social outcomes. This issue is how to reconcile the use of top-down definitions of ethnic identity (e.g., in census and survey categories) often deployed in research designs with contemporary theorizations of ethnicity as an identity that is constructed relationally and situationally from the bottom up. We describe how the documentary method of data analysis helped us address this issue with reference to the focus groups we conducted with aging Black Minority Ethnics (BMEs) in London in 2011. Unable to abandon the institutionalized Black Minority Ethnic categorization in our sampling and recruitment strategy, we found that the documentary method allowed us to discern the degree to which participants thus labeled adopted the pre-defined parameters of BME identity in their interactions with each other. We argue that this analytical approach, which can be applied to a range of qualitative data, can help researchers to work with the often homogenizing institutionalized categorizations that facilitate data collection and make results comparable without negating subjects' lived experiences of that categorization.