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With regard to the limitations of focus groups for eliciting narratives, the issue is not so much that people will be reluctant to share their experiences in a group setting, as that having several participants competing to tell their individual and detailed stories is likely to produce ‘noise’; that is, data that it is hard to order and attribute to individual speakers. The nature of focus group discussions means that stories are unlikely to unfold sequentially, as they can do in a one-to-one interview, and hence the picture presented will be confusing and attempts to analyze data will be frustrated. Ong (2003) reports on a study of experiences of back pain, where the initial focus group allowed participants to tell their individual stories, with later groups focusing more explicitly on the research questions, suggesting that a series of focus groups may be more appropriate, where the intention is to build up a detailed picture of individuals’ experiences.