Agreeing about smartphones: Making opinions in online focus groups.

This paper is concerned with the situated production of opinions in human geography research. Drawing on an online focus group project in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace, I'm interested in how our methods can make opinions as much as collect those that are already assumed to exist. Why were these students inclined to speak of having and sharing opinions? How important should opinions be to us if they are not actively influencing the everyday lives of those who we hope to understand in our studies? And what does this all say about staging effective group discussion in the discipline? This paper considers how opinions feature in human geography research and how focus groups are organised most effectively. It does this by drawing on a study in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]