Despite the growing importance of focus group interviews for the evaluation of new legal mandates, we know very little about how these interviews function in the socially situated and concrete details of communicative practice. Consequently, how such practices mediate our interpretation and assessment of legal policy remains an unexplicated topic of social scientific inquiry. This study explores the role of verbal and nonverbal speech in a focus group interview designed to help evaluate community-policing outcomes. We begin by discussing the linguistic ideologies of focus groups and show how these presuppositions shape the interaction among focus group moderator, members of the evaluation team and community interviewees. The remaining parts of the article demonstrate how a communicative misalignment emerges in the production and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal activities — a state of crosstalk with stark consequences for the assessment of legal change. By focusing on the interpenetration of language and the body in the contextualization of meaning, we outline an approach that allows researchers to track the elusive, yet crucial, relationship between legal process and outcome.
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