Focus Groups

The focus group, or focused group interview, is a frequently used research method across the social sciences. One of many types of interview, the focus group contrasts with individual or dyadic interviews by involving a small group of interviewees—typically between four and eight people—among whom a focused discussion is generated and led by a trained moderator. Lasting from one to two hours, and often including specific prompts to discussion (objects, images, even group tasks), the purpose is to sustain an interaction among members of the group on the topic in focus, rather than to engage in a dyadic question-and-answer exchange between interviewer and interviewees. The focus group is particularly useful when researchers seek to discover the various [Page 609]ways in which people make sense of a social phenomenon through shared discussion.

Focus groups are also widely employed by commercial consumer researchers for a variety of purposes, including product testing and development. The similarly widespread use of focus groups by political parties and government agencies to gauge public opinion has led to criticism of the method for superficiality and manipulability. However, academic interest in focus groups has been revived following the qualitative, reflexive turn in critical social science, the method being valued for generating a dynamic and complex social situation that, when sensitively interpreted, affords the creative exploration of the socially constructed and discursive nature of shared beliefs and understandings of the social world. Recently, both academic and commercial uses of the focus group method have developed an online or virtual counterpart, this offering some new advantages as disadvantages over traditional face-to-face methods.

As a social science method, focus groups were originally adapted by Columbia University sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton as a source of new ideas and hypotheses and as a means of checking the validity of their interpretation of other kinds of data. For example, they used focus groups to interpret data gathered from people pressing buttons to indicate positive and negative emotional reactions to radio programs: after listening and responding to a program, the moderator led a discussion in which participants' responses were reflected back to them so that they could give their reasons for their individual and collective responses—an early example of today's emphasis on reflexive methods that seek to empower and respect respondents as participants in the research process.

The social situation of the focused interview, while “artificial” in some ways, may be understood as simulating everyday situations (including sharing stories and examples and involving disputes or embarrassments) through which groups co-construct meaningful interpretations of the material in focus reflecting the way that public discourse develops through conversation and discussion. For example, Burgess, Harrison, and Maiteny used focus group discussions in their exploration of local responses to environmental threat “to replicate, insofar as is possible through a research design, the domestic and other social settings in which people live” (1991, 502). Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone (1992) used focus groups to explore the ordinary significance of goods, shopping, credit, saving, and debt during the life course.

As with other qualitative methods, focus groups can be used to explore new research possibilities, to generate hypotheses for subsequent quantitative examination, or to resolve puzzles emergent from other methods of data collection. Consequently, sometimes a small number of groups will be used to scope a new research domain or delineate key issues. Alternatively, a more structured approach to sampling may be adopted: for example, one may construct a design for twelve groups, keeping each group demographically homogenous and producing a fully crossed design by age (3—for example, 18–35 years, 35–55 years, 55+), gender (2—male and female) and social class (2—working, middle), thus permitting some tentative conclusions about variation in the key issues by categories of the population. In yet other studies, far more groups may be conducted so as to make claims from the sample to the population (e.g., Kitzinger 1993). However, the key value of focus groups is their mapping of the diversity of publicly generated discussion. One rule of thumb, therefore, is to conduct further groups until they begin to repeat each other, indicating that the main “stories” have been told.

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