Locating Presence and Positions in Online Focus Group Text with Stance-Shift Analysis

Social cues in online focus groups surface in the ways group members manipulate language, to signal their attitudinal shifts in position toward the group’s topics and what both moderators and members may have said. Their primary mode is task-based: their “job” is to respond to topics introduced by the focus group moderator; they also engage in “sidebar chat” among themselves. Using stance-shift analysis on a million-word corpus of online text genres, we identify 10 characteristics of online focus group chat, which may help researchers and retailers to identify when and how group participants might be strongly committed to what they have just written.