Analysis of interview and focus group data for characterizing environments

This paper describes a novel use of interview and focus group data to generate and substantiate hypotheses about a complex environment. In addition, it shows how MacSHAPA, a tool developed for analyzing sequential data, is a useful tool for analyzing these data. Although interviews and focus groups have been used extensively in social science and marketing, there are few examples documenting the use of these techniques in user-centered design. Furthermore, MacSHAPA has not been used to perform content analysis on interview and focus group data. In this paper, interviews and focus groups were collected as part of a larger study to understand human factors issues in quick service restaurant chains. These data were analyzed using MacSHAPA to perform content analysis. The results generated hypotheses that were validated by other data collection activities, and substantiated hypotheses that were derived by other analyses. The shortcomings and tradeoffs of using this analysis method for a human factors investigation are discussed.