Focus Groups

A focus group is a small number of individuals who share common interests in specific issues or events and who are asked to take part in an interactive discussion. Focus group study began in the late 1930s and became more popular in the 1950s with marketing studies. Aside from using interactive discussion groups, researchers also use telephone focus groups, Internet focus groups, and media focus groups depending on the particular purpose of the study or for the sake of convenience.

The purpose of a focus group is to understand how people with common interests feel and think about an issue, product, service, or idea and gather their comments within a comfortable and permissive environment facilitated by a skilled moderator. The intent of the focus group is to comprehend and determine the range of individuals' thoughts and preferences rather than to infer or generalize how respondents might answer. Focus groups are used for decision making, product and program development, primary and secondary research tools, client-satisfaction studies, policy making and testing, and understanding individual concerns.

Qualitative data from at least three different focus groups composed of homogenous participants can represent the subjective motivations and preferences of certain types of individuals. Focus groups are often identified as a nondirective method of study because they rely on asking open-ended questions and enforce no limit on respondents' answers. Good questions for a focus group study are controversial or provocative yet clear, short, one-dimensional, easy, and openended. An efficient strategy is to begin with easy, general questions, ask positive questions before negative questions, and conclude the testing with more specific questions.

The purpose and nature of the study determine the sample type and size of a focus group. Researchers often use purposeful sampling to better understand specific target audiences. The use of a homogenous group of individuals with sufficient variation is recommended. 10 to 12 people is an appropriate size for a commercial topic group, but 6 to 8 people are ideal for general social research.

Moderators should exhibit efficiency of time usage, encourage respondents to reply, and remain cautious when supplying participants with information about the topic or agenda. They are required to have an adequate background, listen to and be comfortable with others, avoid distraction, and know which questions are key to the proceedings.

Acquiring focus group data can be difficult because of both the spontaneity of respondents and the environment. Therefore, transcripts, recordings, notes, and memory-based tools are recommended to obtain significant information during group discussion. There are several strategies to analyzing such qualitative information, such as the popular long-table approach where researchers compare answers in terms of frequency, specificity, emotion, and extensiveness. Recently, researchers have used computers to catch key words and manage data.

Focus groups are a useful means of reflecting individuals' true emotions and behaviors toward subjective issues through a process of observing, listening, documenting, and reporting how respondents interpret what they think or like. However, due to the difficulty in obtaining subjective information from a small number of homogenous participants, focus groups exhibit lower external validity than other research methods. Thus, it is less certain that the opinions expressed in a focus group can be generalized to a larger population.

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