Focus Groups

The Development of Focus Groups

Focus group interviews have been widely used since the late 1950s by market researchers and political pollsters in reaction to the large sample polling techniques that were providing numbers but little insight into what was really going on in the marketplace or the voting population (the “why” behind the numbers). Focus group interviews have also been used by researchers across the social science disciplines (such as, communication, anthropology, gender studies, sociology, and social psychology) because these researchers also wanted insights into a social phenomenon that other research methods were not designed to yield. For example, health communication research in which social psychologists and communication researchers collaborated to design health campaigns aimed at changing college students' drinking behavior first conducted focus group interviews to understand the social functions that drinking served for students. Similarly, in addressing the reasons that college students smoked cigarettes, focus group interviews provided insights into the stress reduction that students associated with smoking and enabled health communication researchers working with educators to design alternative stress-reduction behavior modification courses. And in recent campaigns in which the problem of obesity is being addressed nationally, focus group interviews have been conducted among women suffering from obesity to understand more about the ways in which a health campaign can be designed to help change their eating and exercise habits.

Historically, the focus group interview traces its roots to the use of group therapy methods. Its conceptualization is based on the therapeutic assumption that people who share a common problem will be more willing to talk openly and honestly about it amid the security of others sharing that problem. This heritage underscores the importance of the careful selection of focus group members who are homogeneous vis-à-vis the focus (topic) of the group discussion irrespective of other potential differences, who do not know one another outside the group, and who will therefore feel free to talk candidly with one another their thoughts and feelings about the topic. The name itself, focus group interview, signals that what the group members need to have in common is the topic on which they are “focused” and about which they are interviewed in order to learn their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and/or behaviors. An example is the series of focus group interviews designed to determine [Page 505]the language students used when they referred to binge drinking. Findings of focus group interviews among heavy-drinking college students indicated that they did not identify with the word binge to describe their drinking behavior and were more responsive to the term dangerous drinking. What most distinguishes the focus group interview from the therapy group is that its members share a common relationship to the discussion topic rather than a therapeutic problem.

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