It is evening, after dinner, and you knock timidly at the door of a bungalow in Thornton, a town near the Lancashire coast. A friendly woman in her 40s shows you into a living room with a floral carpet, a gas fire, and a big television set in the corner. It is the first time you have let yourself be talked into going to a focus group.

How do you know what is going to happen? You might think of tupperware parties, club meetings, reading groups, perhaps therapy groups. Whatever is going on, it is unlikely to be completely new; you try to treat it as a version of a familiar practice. But how do we describe such practices, which could include such a range of familiar and unfamiliar events? Erving Goffman warns us that ‘the question “What is it that's going on here?” is considerably suspect. Any event can be described in terms of a focus that includes a wide swath or a narrow one and – as a related but not identical matter – in terms of a focus that is close-up or distant’ (1974: 8). I will try to take a more distant focus first, and then a close-up.

First I will compare various kinds of events in which opinions are displayed, drawing on frameworks from the ethnography of communication that have been used to compare speech events in different cultures.