Using focus groups for empowerment purposes in qualitative health research and evaluation

Researchers and evaluators increasingly use focus groups as a culturally responsive (CR) method to facilitate empowerment – especially among vulnerable groups. Yet, the expansion of this practice muddles the concept of empowerment and purposes for using focus groups for empowerment. Of particular need is a clear differentiation of the purposes for participant empowerment. In this article, we consider prevalent conceptualizations of empowerment and the CR practices used to support empowerment. Next, we clarify the purposes for using focus groups for participant empowerment. For this, we used the health field as a context and analyzed focus group studies. As a result, we identified three empowerment purposes – knowledge-exploration, action-oriented outcomes, community capacity-building – and the CR practices used to facilitate them. Last, we use an example to offer practice-oriented understandings of the three empowerment purposes. This article is important to guide CR focus group empowerment efforts.