Focus Groups

A focus group is a type of qualitative research that takes the form of a group discussion about a topic under the guidance of a trained group moderator. Focus group research is one of the most common research methods used by social scientists, marketing researchers, policy analysts, health and social services professionals, education researchers, political consultants, and other scientists and decision makers to gather information. Focus group research is a distinctive member of the qualitative research family, which also includes individual depth interviewing and ethnography, among others. Focus groups provide rich and detailed data about perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and impressions of group members in the members’ own words. After expanding on the characteristics of focus groups, this entry introduces the emerging trend of virtual focus groups, reviews advantages and limitations of focus group research, and finally describes the process of designing, conducting, and analyzing focus group research.

Focus groups are a remarkably flexible research tool; they can be adapted to obtain information about almost any topic in a wide variety of settings and from very different types of individuals. The discussions that characterize focus group research may be very general or very specific and they may be highly structured or quite unstructured. Demonstrations, photographs, videos, products, samples, or other stimuli may be used to provide a focus for discussion and activities, such as role-playing, creative projects, and “show and tell,” and can provide ways of obtaining data beyond simple discussion. The flexibility of focus group research makes it a particularly useful tool and explains its popularity.

A focus group involves a group discussion of a topic that is the “focus” of the conversation. The focus group interview generally involves 8–12 individuals who discuss a particular topic under the direction of a professional moderator who promotes interaction and assures that the [Page 688]discussion remains on the topic of interest. A typical focus group session will last from 1.5 to 2.5 hours. The most common objective of focus group research is to promote a deep and detailed discussion of a topic about which little is known. The group setting of the discussions that characterize focus group research is uniquely suited for quickly discovering qualitative similarities and differences among people with respect to perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, preferences, ways of doing things, and other characteristics. Focus groups also provide an efficient means for determining the language people use when thinking and talking about specific issues and objects and for suggesting a range of hypotheses about a topic. For this reason, focus groups are often used to inform the wording of surveys and to identify stimuli for subsequent quantitative research. While focus group research may be useful at virtually any point in a research program, they tend to be particularly helpful for exploratory research when little is known about the phenomenon of interest. As a result, focus groups are most often used very early in research projects and are often followed by other types of research that provide quantitative data from larger groups of respondents. Focus groups are also used following analyses of large-scale, quantitative surveys to facilitate interpretation of quantitative results and to add depth to the responses obtained in the more structured survey.

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