Well, today we're going to talk about the second part of the methodology for collecting the LICCI data, it's the focus group discussions. Well, focus group discussions involves gathering people from similar backgrounds or experiences to discuss a specific topic of interest. It's a form of qualitative research method and generally involving a small group of people and also from my personal experience, I would suggest to have at least two people to organize it because one need to be the moderator to guide the conversation, to lead the participation and then the other one can be the one who is recording or taking the notes. Focus group discussions encourages discussion among participations. The major thing is to encourage discussions from the participants instead of the moderator trying to lead or guide. There's more of the real differences when we talk about different approaches for focus group discussions and versus semi-structured interviews. Well the goal for the folks group discussions in LICCI is to discuss, to validate and possible lead to identify newly LICCIs through the gathering with a small group of people. When we talk about sampling, so if you're working in local or indigenous communities and we suggest you do two to four focus groups in total, that's what we consider a site. A spread in different villages are usually, well in most of their sense, probably not in the pastoralists communities, so it's really difficult to define villages in pasture and pastoralists communities. Let's take farming community for example, so you probably have five to six villages in a site, in a bigger administrative level and you want it to spread the focus group discussion organizations as much as possible to include participants from different villages or you can do one in this two or another one in the other two. Depending on the village size and also on whether there's conflicts or power imbalances within the village. When it comes to the focus group discussion per group, we suggest that you organize it between four to 12 people and of course you can have a lot more people, but that's going to be very difficult and challenging for the moderator and for the assistant to capture in the information and also to have a shorter participation because focus group discussions can be long, can be lengthy and can be exhausting for participants. The participants are selected through convenience sampling aiming at capturing the diversity in terms of livelihood activities. Within the site, you possibly would have people who are more involved in farming and some of them are more involved in wild plants gathering. You want to have different expertise and also try to balance with gender and also age. You want to have some older people who possibly have known more about the local communities and activities and also with younger people. The procedure, this is very basic. Procedure of the focus group discussions, usually you need to make appointment with people, with your participants or you just send out a flyer or something in the community, whatever fits the local context, whatever is appropriate in the local context. Make an appointment, set reminders, send reminders to people that all we're going to have this focus group discussion tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Also when it comes to choose the location. We recommend to be central, may be a community center or a school basketball ground instead of doing the focus groups in someone's house. You might get into conflict because, as researchers, a lot of times we don't know the personal conflict of interests within villagers, so try to select a place that is neutral enough to host a small group of people. During the recording, of course, you have to have facilitators and you have to ask for consent if you can record or not. We have a very detailed rules in the LICCI protocol, so if you're interested or if you want to organize focus group discussions in the future, in whatever sense you can check it up. The focus group for the LICCI framework is really to discuss and validate the LICCIs that we have collected previously during the SSI, during the semi-structured interviews. Here I want to highlight what kind of observations from semi-structured interviews should be validated in the focus group discussions. The first one is inconsistent observations. What is inconsistent? Those are the observations people tells you that the temperature is hotter in summer, so this one from probably five people said it, and then some other people might say, the temperature is actually cooler in summer. Those are inconsistent observations, you need to bring it into the focus group discussion to make a decision, to ask people, do you or agree or not agree? Also the second one would be the observations perceived to have different drivers. Some of the observations people attributed to climate change or climate change-related or some people don't. For example, the observation of, the crop yields less now, and some people might say is because it's hotter, because it's dryer, that those are in the climatic systems, so you can classify them as LICCIs. But some people say it's because it's to much pesticides or it's much pests going on. Those are not climate related or those are very different drivers to the same observations, so those you need to bring into the focus groups for validating if it's climate related or not. The third one is a tricky one because we do think sometimes people overlook about certain observations. People don't attribute it to climate change-related, but from a researcher's perspective and from your knowledge and from your instinct that you know, is clearly related or you have doubts, so you can bring those observations into focus group discussions to validate as well. For some of the observations that you do not have to bring into the focus group discussions, so those are the observations that in the climatic system, like if people talking about weather, go back to the classification tray of the LICCI to see what the climatic system contains. If they talk about weather, if they talk about precipitation and those were by default, will be classified into LICCI. For observations with high consensus in the semi-structured interviews, if everyone talks about the crop yields less because of the hotter weather, and then out of 25 interviewees, 24 mentioned it, so that reached a high consensus, you can leave it out. Here we also have developed a very systematic table for the expected output for the focus group discussions. As you can see, this has to be brought from the semi-structured interviews, and you can record the level of agreement, disagreed after debate, agreed after debate, or fully agreed. Be aware that it's always suggested to have the LICCI classification tree in mind, so go through the classification a few times, you'll have a better understanding of the classification. Then directions, so select the change directions; is increase more higher or decrease less lower, etc.
