WhatsApp’s ubiquity in many people’s everyday lives points at new possibilities for conducting online and mobile focus groups. Yet, research on the benefits and potential pitfalls of this is negligible. This paper offers new empirical insights from using the method as part of a digital ethnography with young activists in Western Kenya. The presence of WhatsApp in participants’ everyday lives offers a context with high ecological validity. The paper suggests that this opens up new options for designing online focus groups, transcending the traditional categorisation between synchronous and asynchronous interactions and some limitations of both approaches. WhatsApp also offers opportunities for creating more inclusive group discussions. Using discourse analysis of the WhatsApp focus group, the paper also finds that this familiarity and inclusivity affords the potential for group deliberation, which can be particularly valuable in participatory research.

WhatsApp在许多人的日常生活中无处不在，这为开展在线和移动焦点小组活动提供了新的可能性。但是，有关此方法的好处和潜在陷阱的研究可以忽略不计。本文将这种方法作为数字民族志的一部分，与肯尼亚西部的年轻激进主义者一起使用，提供了新的经验性见解。在参与者的日常生活中WhatsApp的存在提供了具有高度生态有效性的环境。该论文建议，这为设计在线焦点小组开辟了新的选择，超越了同步和异步交互之间的传统分类以及这两种方法的局限性。WhatsApp还为创建更具包容性的小组讨论提供了机会。通过对WhatsApp焦点小组的话语分析，