In this article, we reflect on our contrasting experiences of using focus groups in two different empirical research projects, one that explored the attitudes of mature students in further education towards possible participation in higher education, the other that examined young women’s relationships to feminism. In particular, we analyse the ways in which our research questions and approaches were challenged, honed and sometimes transformed in the light of our participants’ responses to our chosen method of research. For, while the mature students of the former project - many of whom had previously experienced formal education as negative - felt discomfort at the atmosphere of collective examination that the group engendered, and resisted discussion on their thoughts and feelings, the young women of the latter study welcomed the legitimacy that the formal focus group lent to their desire to discuss the socially taboo subject of feminism. We thus seek to show how we gained knowledge and understanding about our research topics through our participants’ responses to the method we selected as well as through their direct contributions in the research moment.