ABSTRACT
Focus group participants are usually unknown to the researchers. Focus groups can be used as a stand-alone data collection method for self-contained studies or they can supplement other forms of data collection. The benefits of focus group research for describing the range of possible responses to a particular issue as well as for revealing important points of convergence or contention through group interaction are great. In health services research (HSR), data gleaned from the interchanges between participants often get quantified during the analytic data reduction process. A focus group study can enroll a great many participants in little time, and focus groups can be held back-to-back if enough facilitators are available, leading to low time costs. The chapter designs a qualitative content analysis protocol to analyze the focus group transcriptions. A key goal of the analysis was to derive a socioculturally contextualized schema for organizing or categorizing the barriers to care.
