Gomez Research

Getting Results from Focus Groups

Focus groups are an effective tool for gaining insight into the motivations, needs, concerns, and priorities of the people you serve or the audience you are trying to reach. While focus groups seem intuitive and deceptively simple, they require careful preparation, moderation, and interpretation to be useful and reliable. Presented below are some general guidelines for planning and executing focus groups.

Make sure you are using focus groups to answer the right type of question. While focus groups can provide reliable information about the needs, concerns, and perceptions of a target audience, they are not useful for measuring the extent to which a view or practice is widespread. For example, a focus group would be very helpful in testing a communication strategy to determine how people interpret it, feel about it, and whether it communicates the intended message. However, focus groups would not be useful to measure how many people have been exposed to your advertising campaign or how many people have changed their behavior as a result.

Recruit the right people. Ensuring that the right people attend your focus group is the single most overlooked aspect of the focus group process. If the right people are not present, nothing that follows will be relevant. Focus group participants should not be familiar with one another and they should be as homogenous as possible. The purpose of focus groups is to bring people together with common experiences and perspectives to create a safe and inclusive environment that encourages honesty and disclosure. Resist the temptation to include a few members from every ethnic and income background you care about into a single group. This makes analyses by demographics difficult and undermines the intimacy of the group discussion. Finally, it is important to select participants who are comfortable expressing their opinions and talking in a group.

Keep the discussion guide simple and flexible. A common mistake in designing a discussion guide is trying to cover too much ground with highly specific and closed-ended questions. What makes focus group discussions so useful is the ability to probe for the underlining feelings and motivations. Questions should be simple and open ended. For example, "What did you think of the program?" is a good question because it allows the respondent the opportunity to structure an answer in a variety of ways. A closed ended question will not stimulate the same discussion and is more suited to a survey questionnaire. For example, "To what extent were you satisfied with the program?" will produce simple and narrowly focused responses. In addition, it is often not productive to ask respondents "why" they gave a particular answer. This elicits responses that are simple, to the point, and often defensive. Instead, ask what prompted, influenced, caused or made them act in a certain way.

Use of a professional moderator. Skilled moderation is difficult. A professional moderator will encourage an honest and open discussion, ensure that the group is not dominated by a few outspoken individuals, and will probe for complete answers. In leading a discussion, a moderator listens for the intensity of comments, and the emotions behind them, not simply the proportion of participants who say they agree with a particular position. A good moderator takes care not to steer a discussion in a certain direction and allows for silence, if necessary, to elicit responses.

Keep the focus group small. It is essential that a focus group does not get too large. A group of 8 to 10 participants is ideal. The smaller the group, the more flexibility the moderator has to probe for deeper, more complete answers and the more likely people will feel comfortable talking. If you want to include the opinions of a greater number of people, hold additional groups.

Donít analyze focus groups like a survey questionnaire. Analyzing focus group results requires careful interpretation. Ideally, the moderator should perform the analysis since this person has had first hand exposure to the discussion and has observed the interactions. It is not adequate to simply tally the number of people in a discussion group who share a particular view. The analyst is looking for major and minor themes, and the intensity of particular beliefs and opinions. A skilled analyst will consider changes in the questioning route (when the discussion suddenly took a different turn and why); descriptive phrases or words used by participants; body language; and the overall tone of the discussion.