Focus Group

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Focus Group provide insights into how people think and provide a deeper understanding of the phenomena being studied. While a valuable research tool, surveys generally ask closed-ended questions that may limit the feedback that can be gained from a respondent. A method to gain more in-depth information to supplement surveys is interviews; conducting interviews, however, can be an expensive proposition that can exceed the available resources.

Focus Group are group interviews that give the researcher the ability to capture deeper information more economically than individual interviews. Economy is an important benefit but there are other benefits of focus groups when compared to interviews. Group interaction and non-verbal communication are primary benefits of focus groups. Group interaction between members of the target population during focus groups may encourage participants to make connections to various concepts through the discussions that may not occur during individual interviews. A skilled facilitator can encourage these group interactions to capture this data to provide a more comprehensive understanding of what is being studied. Non-verbal communication is also data that can be captured in focus groups. Participants within a focus group may respond very differently to a topic. A topic related to gender equity, for example, may provoke intense discussion among female participants while male participants withdraw from the discussion. This type of interaction is observation data for analytical purposes. Focus groups can be integrated into an overall study design or can occur individually when a specific topic is being explored. This methodology brief focuses only on focus group design and will not discuss its integration into an overall study.

Reasons for using focus groups

Focus groups are a useful method to:

investigate complex behavior
discover how different groups think and feel about a topic and why they hold certain opinions
identify changes in behavior
investigate the use, effectiveness and usefulness of library collections and services
verify or clarify the results from surveys
suggest potential solutions to problems identified
inform decision-making, strategic planning and resource allocation
to add a human dimension to impersonal data
To deepen understanding and explain statistical data.

Advantages of focus groups

The main advantages of focus groups are:

they are useful to obtain detailed information about personal and group feelings, perceptions and opinions
they can save time and money compared to individual interviews
they can provide a broader range of information
they offer the opportunity to seek clarification
they provide useful material e.g. quotes for public relations publication and presentations

Disadvantages of focus groups

The main disadvantages of focus groups are:

there can be disagreements and irrelevant discussion which distract from the main focus
they can be hard to control and manage
they can to tricky to analyse
they can be difficult to encourage a range of people to participate
some participants may find a focus group situation intimidating or off-putting; participants may feel under pressure to agree with the dominant view
As they are self-selecting, they may not be representative of non-users.