Focus Groups

FOCUS GROUPS NORMALLY consist of eight to 16 participants selected from a larger population (for example, a state, city, or school district) who meet for two to three hours to voice various topics. A facilitator leads focus group discussions, attempting to elicit genuine opinions and feelings about certain focal subjects. Focus groups were first used during World War II by sociologists to help understand the impact of propaganda films on troops. Businesses soon afterwards discovered the value of focus groups for market research, using consumers in their focus groups to test product ideas. Focus groups have recently gained popularity with the media, entertainment industry, law, and politics. However, focus groups remain controversial because focus group participants generate non-representative, qualitative data.

Critics, especially proponents of public opinion polling, argue that polls provide hard, representative, quantitative data on actual public opinion, while the few participants in focus groups can only represent themselves. Consequently, these critics contend it is unwise to draw generalizations about public opinion from such small, unrepresentative groups.

Despite the criticisms of focus groups, they have nonetheless been used increasingly in politics, especially in political campaigns for high elective office, where there is enough money to pay for costly polling and focus groups. Because winning is everything, all feasible methods are employed by public opinion consultants in these campaigns to gain insights into what voters are thinking. Opinion polls are used extensively to quantify voter opinions about their candidates, their opponents, campaign issues, and any other opinions that may help develop a winning campaign strategy. However, many campaign consultants believe that poll numbers alone cannot provide the insights needed to truly understand the thinking and feelings of voters.

A typical poll question can provide pollsters with the percentage of registered or likely voters who support particular candidates or issues, but mere percentages cannot get into the minds of voters to tell opinion researchers why they feel the way they do. To really understand voter opinion, proponents of focus groups contend, it is necessary to go beyond the numbers and probe the reasons why certain opinions are held.

The objective of a focus group is more than getting “for” and “against” answers. It is not enough to find out that 62 percent “favor” stem cell research, while 30 percent “oppose” and the rest have “no opinion” or are “undecided.” These numbers alone do not explain the rational and emotional reasons why these respondents favor or oppose stem cell research, for example; nor do the numbers reflect the intensity of emotion behind the numbers. Focus group facilitators, working for political campaigns, try to get into the minds of voters, probing their inner feelings about candidates and the issues.

Telephone interviews normally cover many questions in a period of a few minutes, but focus groups last for hours, giving the facilitator considerable time to interact with participants, hopefully getting them to talk candidly about various subjects. Gaining such insights can prove very valuable to campaign strategists.

For example, they can design political advertisements that will most likely be successful, because they have already been test marketed in their focus groups. Strategists can also temper what their candidates should say on the campaign trail, testing issue positions in focus group sessions.

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