Policing evaluation: Focus group interviews as an embodied speech event

Abstract

Despite recommendations for a more reflexive and theoretical turn to interviewing, the analysis of language and speech still occupies center stage. This study attempts to advance our understanding of the interview by including the use of gesture, gaze, and other embodied resources in concert with speech. Looking at a focus group interview evaluating community policing policy, I show how inclusion of embodied conduct offers a more robust approach to co-constructed meaning in the interview than looking at language practices alone. More explicitly, I investigate how an interviewee’s narrative includes gestures to solicit an affiliative stance from other interviewees and how ambiguous metacommunicative norms in the focus group influence the contributions of other police participants. I show how jurisdictional boundary and professional identity emerge in and through the integration of embodied conduct and sociocultural solidarity.

“Do I Look Like My Selfie?”: Filters and the Digital-Forensic Gaze

“…Our analysis attends to how looking behaviors between people were reported, and within the conversations, the qualifications, the pauses, the equivocations, the jokes, as well as how word-affect relationships create meanings for participants. We emphasize the sociality of looking directed at selfies and understand focus group methodologies as crucial for examining “shared and tacit beliefs” (Gilbert, 2017, p. 343) as manifested through interactions with others. We also trace shared discourses activated through conversations that meandered, told stories, paused, and provoked emotions.…”

How Else Would You Take a Photo? #SelfieAmbivalence

“…A focus group approach was critical for “unearthing ‘shared and tacit beliefs’ and how these emerge in and through interaction with others” (Gilbert, 2017: 343). Our interest in looking at how certain meanings are normalized and shared, was facilitated as discussions were allowed to flow and dialogues, interruptions, stories and silences resolved themselves.…”