Set The Scene
Focus groups are an artificial meeting of strangers that need to be organised in a relaxed and informal manner where respondents feel motivated to freely express opinions.
To achieve this, the moderator:-
- Sets the scene for the discussion by outlining the informality of the meeting
- Provides an impression that questions will be spontaneous (bullet points and prompts rather than extensive scripts help facilitate this)
- Engages with respondents through body language to show empathy with their comments
Treat the respondents as experts
One value of focus groups is the ability of respondents to express opinions in their own words rather than be constrained by a tight questionnaire.
This can have the danger that respondents wander off the subject so moderators need to balance the need to stay focussed against listening to related information from respondents.
To achieve this a moderator:-
- Needs to avoid positioning themselves as experts on a subject. If a moderator knows the answers, what’s the point of the group
- Reveal subjects by asking questions in increasing depth and doing so in an enquiring way to make respondents feel they are in control of the answers and are the experts
- Draw in other respondents to develop particular responses or opinions to develop the required detail for subjects
- Maintain eye contact to motivate and encourage responses
Establish whether you want opinions or knowledge
Focus groups are used for a variety of reasons and whilst knowledge and facts are useful; focus groups excel at extracting individual attitudes, opinions, perceptions and beliefs.
The introduction (setting the scene) and question technique of the moderator lets respondents know we are interested in their views, as well as testing their knowledge of facts:-
- Let respondents know you require attitudes, opinions, perceptions and beliefs and that we expect differences between respondent comments
- Anyone can make the comments as they are not necessarily based on experience or education
- Comments can be stimulated by asking for subjective (that TV is the one I like) or objective (TVs are too complicated) opinions
- Comments can be controlled by asking for detail, reasons or descriptions (TVs are complicated because there are too many buttons on the remote controls). However; this technique starts to introduce knowledge and experience which will slow responses
Balance the respondent feedback
The challenge for moderators is to balance the need for respondents to freely express opinions in their own way while guiding them to answer questions in a particular format. On the one hand the respondent needs to have the illusion of control when responding, while the moderator is guiding the direction of that feedback. Moderators maintain the balance both through the introduction (setting the scene) and the form of questions used:-
- Advise what is required in terms of feedback and whether you need opinions or facts
- When questions are asked, give examples of the type of responses expected
- Use projective techniques to give or emphasise responses
- Use whiteboard lists to guide the format of answers
- Occasionally a respondent will go off track and this can be headed off by asking the same question or a similar question to another respondent – ‘thank you, now what does X think about that etc’.
Manage extreme opinions
Groups need to be a balance of opinions. We don’t want everyone to agree with each other otherwise groups will have no more benefit than depth interviews, neither do we want stand up brawls.
The moderator ensures diversity in groups while seeking to gain majority opinions in order to draw conclusion on topics by:-
- Setting the scene at the start of the group so respondents know we expect differences of opinion
- Ensuring the moderator has no opinion about the subjects and is entirely neutral
- Where there is too much agreement, probing can take place on particular aspects of a subject to introduce variety of opinion
- Where discussion becomes too extreme this can be controlled by rephrasing the question or emphasising a different aspect of the question (to one that is less contentious).
What next?
Break out of convention and try something different:-
- ‘Ask a respondent or number of respondents to justify a decision or choice to the rest of a group’
- ‘Ask a respondent or number of respondents to justify why they will not agree to a decision or choice’
- Introduce team play with half the group justifying why they will pursue a particular action or choice and the other half justifying why they will not
- The video is a common feature of focus groups ” does anyone use them? A technique to gain value from recordings is to go back to respondents who have made relevant or useful comments and ask them to repeat that point again or ask the group to sum up their opinions about the discussion or topic ” you now have 5 minutes of sound bites you can edit from the end of your focus group recording.
