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Record W4415008717 · doi:10.2196/70986

Exploring the Acceptability and Suitability of Synchronous Online Focus Groups for Health Research With Métis Nation of Ontario Citizens: An Internet-Based Survey

2025· article· en· W4415008717 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueJMIR Formative Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicFocus Groups and Qualitative Methods
Canadian institutionsInstitute for Clinical Evaluative SciencesMétis National CouncilPublic Health OntarioUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFocus groupFocus (optics)The InternetWork (physics)Affect (linguistics)Online research methodsSelection (genetic algorithm)Internet research

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic forced many researchers to adjust research methods from in-person to online formats. This paper explores the acceptability and suitability of synchronous online focus groups used to explore housing and health with Métis Nation of Ontario (MNO) citizens, one of 3 constitutionally recognized Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Objective: The objective of this internet-based survey was to understand the experiences of MNO citizens participating in synchronous online focus groups. Methods: Only participants of the "Understanding Housing and Health" project were eligible to complete the survey and were recruited via a 'thank you' email. The survey asked respondents to rate their experience, satisfaction, and preference, as well as the feasibility and cultural appropriateness of the online focus group. An open textbox allowed respondents to share additional thoughts. Demographic and personal information (ie, age, gender, MNO region, and email) were collected. A total of 33/35 eligible participants completed the survey. A content analysis was conducted to generate themes from the open textbox responses and used to triangulate the results. The survey was developed collaboratively with MNO staff. Results: Most respondents identified as women and were 45-65 years and older. All respondents had used Zoom before, and most (n=28, 85%) were either strongly or somewhat confident in their ability to use Zoom. One hundred percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed that they would participate in an online focus group in the future, and 86% of respondents strongly (n=22, 67%) or somewhat (n=7, 21%) agreed that an online focus group was culturally appropriate for Métis health research. A total of 82% (n=27) of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed that an online focus group was more feasible. Moreover, 58% (n=19) of respondents strongly or somewhat disagreed that they would have preferred to participate in an in-person focus group, while 27% (n=9) were neutral. Around 58% (n=19) of respondents could see other participants all of the time and did not experience lag at any point, while 25 (76%) could hear other participants all of the time, indicating fewer issues with audio. A total of 70% (n=23) of respondents felt they could connect with others all or most of the time, while 30% (n=10) felt they could do this some of the time or rarely. Content analysis of the open textbox responses generated 4 themes: internet and technology issues, accessibility, structure of the group discussion, and positive feedback. Conclusions: The use of online focus groups for research with MNO citizens is acceptable; however, internet and technology issues can affect a participant's ability to fully engage. Considerations around cultural appropriateness and connecting with others should be made. This information will help inform method selection for future research work conducted in collaboration with the MNO.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.075
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.832
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0750.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.493
GPT teacher head0.554
Teacher spread0.062 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it