Focus groups are not just the tools of commercial marketers. In recent years groups based on sharing knowledge have become a part of the democratic and educational process as well. This introduces the idea of analyzing focus groups to examine shared knowledge about such social issues as AIDS, biotechnology, or political systems. It defines dialogism, or the interlinking between interaction, social knowledge and dialog, then describes focus groups through that lens, giving main assumptions about the use of analytical tools in the study of focus groups, data and analytical approaches and communicative activity types. It then address the dialogical display of heterogeneity in speakers in focus groups, the circulation of ideas, and themata in dialog in which social knowledge is taken as shared. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)