Focus Groups to Empower Restorative Coordinators

• In Event: Restorative Justice as Reparative Research: Conceptualizing RJ as Methodology

Abstract

Objective:
Restorative practices (RP) provide a useful alternative to suspension, but students of color still experience more frequent suspensions than White students (Anyon et al., 2016). We interviewed and held focus groups with restorative coordinators across the US, soliciting their perspectives on barriers to equitable restorative implementation (First author et al., 2024).
The current paper investigates an unexpected but significant methodological finding: while participants spoke only tangentially about equity in their interviews, the focus groups spoke more explicitly about equity. We analyze how three activities we used to facilitate our focus groups prompted equity-oriented discussion. We then propose implications for future research and professional development.

Framework:
Grounded theory engages “multiple individuals who have responded to an action or participated in a process” to share their experience of a “central phenomenon” (Creswell & Poth, 2018). This is consistent with the co-constructive nature of problem-solving in both restorative justice (Aquino et al., 2021) and focus groups (Hall, 2020).

Methods:
We utilized a two-tiered qualitative design. Individual interviews allowed us to solicit the barriers each participant faced. We coded and synthesized their responses into five overarching barriers. Next, we held Zoom-based focus groups with three activities for problem co-construction (Hall, 2020). These activities were as follows: 1) We shared a scenario incorporating the five common barriers participants had shared; 2) We asked participants how the common barriers related to each other in the scenario; and 3) We asked participants to discuss how they would prepare future school leaders to confront these barriers. We analyzed focus group transcripts through three rounds of coding, consistent with Corbin and Strauss’s (2015) grounded theory approach.

Results:
In their interviews, participants identified five overarching barriers to equitable RP implementation: lack of time, inconsistency, lack of clear administrative messaging, lack of administrator buy-in, and discrimination. Presented with these five barriers in the focus groups, participants spoke more broadly about systemic barriers, such as the ways that White supremacy, school policing, and economic inequality prevented equity-oriented initiatives from taking hold. Coordinators emphasized that school leaders needed to lead the charge for RP, but that this in part required them to explicitly confront systemic inequality beyond their schools.

Across all four focus groups, we witnessed participants build on each other’s perspectives to develop a shared understanding of systemic barriers to restorative justice as well as what equitable implementation would look like. The full paper will detail how participants built dialectically on each other to make sense of the equity-focused barriers they faced.

Significance:
The study’s focus group design served as an opportunity to connect practitioners who are usually isolated in their roles and institutions. Focus groups represent a process of collaborative sensemaking and reflection, where participants can build on each other and locate themselves as part of a broader movement. We posit that the activities we used in our focus groups may be useful for future research on restorative justice and other equity initiatives.

Author

• Hilary Lustick, University of Massachusetts - Lowell