Online focus groups: establishing those impossible focus groups
Online groups solve the recruitment problem that kills specialist B2B qualitative work — at the cost of some of what makes a group a group.
Some groups cannot be convened. Eight hospital procurement managers, or eight specifiers of industrial fixings, are not going to be in the same city on the same evening, and the ones who would travel are not representative of the ones who would not. This is the recruitment problem that quietly limits how much qualitative work gets done in specialist markets, and it is the problem online groups exist to solve.
What you keep
The defining feature of a focus group is not that several people are asked the same questions. It is the interaction: participants respond to each other, positions get tested, and the researcher gets to watch an opinion being formed rather than merely reported. That survives online, provided the format is genuinely a discussion and not a survey with a chat window.
Asynchronous formats add something the room does not have. A discussion board running over three days lets a participant go and look at the thing being discussed, come back and correct themselves. In technical categories this produces better evidence than an immediate answer.
What you lose
Tone, hesitation and the pause before a diplomatic answer are most of what an experienced moderator reads. Text strips them out. Video restores some and introduces its own selection effect, because the people willing to appear on camera are not a random subset.
Group dynamics also change shape rather than disappearing. The dominant participant in a room talks over people; the dominant participant online simply posts first and longest, and anchors everyone who arrives later. Moderation has to be more interventionist, not less.
Moderation is the whole job
The moderator’s task is unchanged: guide rather than lead, probe where an answer is thin, and make sure the quiet participants get heard. Online it requires more deliberate technique — directed questions to named participants, sequencing so that the first response is not always from the same person, and a willingness to close a thread that has settled into agreement.
The limits worth stating
Findings from any focus group are shaped by group behaviour and are not a measurement. A group of eight tells you what the arguments are, which is exactly what you need before writing a questionnaire and never a substitute for fielding one. Online groups do not change that; they change who can be in the group. Treat the output as hypotheses, and quantify separately.
