10.5. Focus Groups

Focus groups are qualitative interviews focused on a particular topic that researchers conduct with multiple respondents at the same time. They resemble one-on-one in-depth interviews in that a researcher may prepare an interview guide in advance and interact with participants by asking them questions in a more or less unstructured fashion. But anyone who has conducted both one-on-one interviews and focus groups knows that each is unique. In a one-on-one in-depth interview, usually one person (the interviewee) is most active while the other (the researcher) plays the role of listener, conversation-guider, and question-asker. Focus groups, on the other hand, are meant to spark discussion and debate within the group. As a result, researchers play a very different role than they do in one-on-one interviews. Rather than just asking questions, they are actively trying to get participants to talk to each other. They observe these interactions among participants in addition to listening to what each person has to say.

Focus groups are very popular among researchers outside academia. One of the earliest documented uses of focus groups comes from World War II, when government researchers used them to assess the effectiveness of troop training materials and various propaganda efforts (Morgan 1997). Market researchers quickly adopted this method to gather information about the products or services they aim to sell. Today, focus groups are widely used by marketers as well as researchers working on behalf of government agencies and political campaigns, who often employ them to learn how members of the public feel about a particular issue or candidate. Within the social sciences, the use of focus groups did not really take off until the 1980s, when demographers and communication researchers began to appreciate their use in understanding knowledge, attitudes, and communication.

In the following sections we’ll describe some of the practical considerations that go into planning and implementing focus groups.

Who Should Be in Your Focus Group?

A focus group can include anywhere between three and twelve participants (Adler and Clark 2007). One key consideration when determining the size of a focus group is the topic of the interview—specifically, whether it is a subject that participants will have a lot to say about without much prompting. If participants are likely to feel passionately about the topic being discussed, a group of three to five makes sense. Groups larger than that, especially for heated topics, can easily become unmanageable. If you are new to running a focus group, you may also want to keep the group on the smaller side.

Focus group researchers must carefully consider the composition of the groups they put together. The background characteristics of participants—their age, gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on—will influence the extent to which specific individuals are silent or talkative during the conversation, as well as what they are willing to say in front of others (Hollander 2004). It may seem counterintuitive, but it is usually better to form focus groups consisting of participants who do not know one another (Agar and MacDonald 1995). Friends, relatives, or acquaintances may share some taken-for-granted knowledge, and it is often these sorts of assumptions that researchers are looking to uncover. Focus group researchers should therefore avoid setting up interactions where participants may be discouraged to question or raise issues that they take for granted. However, members of the group should not be so different from one another that participants do not feel at ease talking to one another. Focus group researcher David Morgan (1997:36) suggests that “homogeneity in background and not homogeneity in attitudes” should be the goal, since participants must feel comfortable speaking up but must also have enough differences to facilitate a productive discussion.

The Role of the Moderator

In a focus group, participants may ask each other follow-up questions, agree or disagree with one another, and even come up with questions not previously conceived of by the researcher. All of these details are potentially useful—in addition, of course, to each individual’s direct responses to the questions posed. Ensuring fruitful interactions within the focus group is the responsibility of the moderator (also known as a facilitator), a researcher tasked with overseeing the conversation in a focus group. The moderator’s job is not to ask questions to each person individually, but to stimulate conversation between participants.

When you moderate a focus group, you should set ground rules at the outset of the discussion. Ask participants to avoid having side conversations; thoughts or reactions to what is said in the group are important and should be shared with everyone. Remind participants you’ve invited them to the group because you want to hear from all of them. With that goal in mind, only one person should speak at a time, and a few participants should not dominate the conversation. To set a tone of participation by everyone, you can begin the discussion by asking each participant to introduce themselves or provide a response to an opening question. Although there are risks that certain members of a focus group will monopolize the conversation, it’s worth noting that focus groups are also good at getting people to participate who may be intimidated by a one-on-one interview setting because they feel they have nothing to contribute. In a focus group, the encouragement and moral support provided by other group members may encourage them to speak up (Kitzinger 1995).

The moderator will play a less active role as the focus group starts chugging along and participants start talking to one another. That said, there may be times when the conversation drags or when you, as moderator, wish to guide the conversation in another direction. As we discussed with one-on-one interviews, it is best not to abruptly shift gears. Show that you have been listening carefully to what people have been saying with a deft transition: “So several of you have mentioned X. But what about Y?” Likewise, to shift the focus to participants who have been less active in the group, you might say something like: “Let’s hear more about what Delaney and Sunil think about what Dominick has been saying.”

Researchers may choose to use multiple moderators to make managing these various tasks easier. They may record the focus group session. And if the moderators have their hands full with running the meeting, they may recruit a notetaker to draft field notes based on what transpired during the focus group. In addition to any patterns or themes observed in people’s responses, the notetaker can record what expressions, mannerisms, and other nonverbal cues people used to convey their feelings, how the participants influenced the flow of the conversation through moments of humor or interruptions, and how they managed disagreements (Liamputtong 2011). Focus groups are analyzed in a similar way as one-on-one interviews are, but this interactive dimension between participants—hopefully captured by the notetaker and any video or audio recordings—adds additional depth to the data collected.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Focus Groups

Focus groups share many of the strengths and weaknesses of one-on-one qualitative interviews. Both methods can yield very detailed, in-depth information. Both are excellent for studying social processes. And both provide researchers with an opportunity not only to hear what participants say but also to observe other cues about their feelings, attitudes, and backgrounds. Focus groups offer the added benefit of giving researchers a chance to collect data on human interaction by observing how group participants respond and react to one another.

Like one-on-one qualitative interviews, focus groups suffer from the drawback of requiring a substantial amount of time and effort on the part of researchers. In fact, focus groups arguably require more planning than any other qualitative method of data collection. In one-on-one interviews, for example, researchers can improvise questions based on how the conversation unfolds. But focus groups must be carefully constructed from the beginning. As we noted, researchers need to recruit participants who will comfortably interact with one another. They also need to control the timing of the event so that participants are not asked to stay for a longer time than they’ve agreed to participate. That said, there may be some time savings with focus groups as it takes fewer group events than one-on-one interviews to gather data from the same number of people.

A weakness that is unique to focus groups is that one or two participants might dominate the conversation, silencing other participants. Similarly, a focus group whose members do not work well with one another can wind up in a state of disengagement or hostility, making it hard to generate the stimulating, interactive discussions that are the hallmark of an effective focus group. Addressing these potential problems requires researchers to be careful in selecting the members of their focus group and skilled in moderating the session in real time. Another drawback of focus groups is that they may worsen problems with social desirability bias in qualitative interviews, given that participants are being judged by a larger audience. That said, a sense of camaraderie within a focus group may also encourage reticent members to speak up, and having one or more members broach sensitive topics can prompt others to share their views or experiences. A more intractable problem for focus groups is that they weaken the ability of researchers to protect the privacy of a study’s participants. While it is standard for researchers to tell participants to keep what is said in the group confidential, they cannot control what individuals say to other people after the focus group has wrapped up.