What advice would you give to Michelle about her selection of participants for her focus groups?

Michelle had been a student union welfare officer on a year’s sabbatical from her undergraduate accounting and financial management degree. During that time, she had encountered many students who had suffered hardship while at university as a consequence of limited financial support. Prior to her sabbatical year, in the second year of her studies, she had encountered social accounting, the idea that accounting could capture alternative goals and outcomes to economic performance, such as community, social values and fairness in the distribution of social resources (Ball and Seal 2005; Owen 2008). She was particularly impressed by a paper by Cooper et al. (2005) suggesting that social accounting could have a real impact in the struggle for change if it as linked to the aspirations of social movements.