This paper describes the use of focus groups to support ethical analysis of pubic interests related to genomics and biotechnology. This work represents one “stream” of the research encompassed by the Genome Canada funded project, Democracy, Ethics and Genomics: Consultation, Deliberation and Modeling.
The objectives of the paper are to describe the moral dimensions and perspectives of the issues raised by focus group participants, to assess the information required to support informed dialogue about issues, and to describe some necessary components of ethical analysis of these issues. As such, the paper presents a sample analysis which the reader can compare with the other empirical approach in the project, Norms Evolving in Response to Dilemmas (NERD) (see Ahmad et al., 2006).
The purpose of this comparison is to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of two approaches for assessing public input on common topics—in this case, salmon genomics and aquaculture—a surprisingly rare activity (Abelson et al., 2003)
