*2.2. Focus Group*

According to Kitzinger [40], "focus groups are group discussions organized to explore a specific set of issues such as people's views and experiences ... ". The idea of conducting group interviews is not a new one. Bogardus [41] is an early example of a reference to utilizing the group interview. Frey and Fontana [42] sugges<sup>t</sup> that group interviews can be formally structured for a specific purpose or can be performed in a more informal setting where a researcher can "stimulate a group discussion". Specific examples in the literature of focus groups being developed systematically within the area of aircraft maintenance and managemen<sup>t</sup> are scarce. Frey and Fontana [42] state that although group interviews have implicitly informed research, often they are not formally acknowledged as part of the process. Powell and Single [43] remind us that when recruiting focus group participants, one must be mindful of systemic biases. Averting this was ensured by being careful to enlist the participants from di fferent organizations

and different positions of responsibility. Three sessions comprising of three industry professionals within each group were successfully moderated by the researcher. During the three phases of working with the focus group, statements and terms were recorded as dialogue amongs<sup>t</sup> the members and observed. The second meeting of the focus group developed four codes (safety, regulatory compliance, root cause, reporting) that had emerged from the group's earlier outputs. These four codes were further distilled during the focus group activity and were consolidated into two themes (reporting, root cause) that were to eventually form part of the piloted semi-structured interview instrument.

Reporting and root-cause themes were the result of the draft consolidation of the comments and emerging codes. In concert with the focus group activities, a literature review was performed by the researchers and this generated three further themes as reflected in Table 2.


**Table 2.** Codification themes used in the NVivo analysis of the final set of publications.

The resulting draft semi-structured template (provided in Appendix A) containing the five themes was scrutinized by the focus group. The constituent questions relating to each theme and the running order of the document was subject to many minor changes during the individual piloting of the instrument with the three group members.
