A focus group typically involves a rigid question-and-answer session among participants.

As a business owner, you can’t properly target or service your audience if you don’t gather information about their specific wants, needs and fears. One of the most effective means of obtaining this type of information is to go directly to your audience to find out what’s on their minds.

A focus group is a common qualitative research technique used by companies for marketing purposes. It typically consists of a small number of participants, usually about six to 12, from within a company's target market. The consumers are brought together and led through discussions of important company and brand topics by a moderator.

A focus group is qualitative research because it asks participants for open-ended responses conveying thoughts or feelings. The other prominent research type is quantitative research. This is more data-driven research that uses surveys or questionnaires to derive numerical-based statistics or percentages.

With qualitative research, researchers seek more open and complete perspectives on the brand or product. However, more general interpretations and uses of the research are necessary, since you cannot as easily break down the research into facts.

Within a focus group, a moderator poses a series of questions intended to gain insight about the way the group views the brand, product, related images, slogans, concepts or symbols. As a representative sample of consumers targeted by the company, a focus group can offer insights consistent with those shared by the broader target market. Focus-group moderators should pose questions in a way that does not lead group members to provide desired responses, but rather honest and insightful responses.

In most instances, you will have to offer some type of incentive to your focus group members to ensure their active and honest participation. If you hire a research firm to conduct your focus group, that firm will typically handle the disbursement of the incentive, whether it’s a monetary payment or some type of free product or service.

A focus group is generally more useful when outcomes of research are very unpredictable and you’re looking for more open feedback rather than comparisons of potential results as in a quantified research method. A focus group also allows consumers to express clear ideas and share feelings that do not typically come out in a quantified survey or paper test. Because of the open conversation among group members, topics and discussions are freer flowing and members can use comments from others to stimulate recall.

Another benefit is that the moderator can observe the dynamics among members of the focus group as they discuss their opinions with each other. In many of these groups, the moderator will leave the room to allow focus group members to communicate with each other without feeling self-conscious. This type of honest commentary can often yield nuggets that you can later use to further refine your marketing strategy and your messaging.

"Groupthink" is a primary concern with focus groups. When you bring a group of people together to talk about a brand, the tendency exists for influential group members to affect the expressions of others within the group. Additionally, consumers are often more reluctant to express negative ideas in a face-to-face setting than in a more indirect research format when they know the company is conducting research.

Another major drawback of a focus group is that if you don’t hire a good moderator, it can be difficult to elicit the full range of thoughts, opinions, wants and needs of the group. And if your moderator is weak, some focus group members may not feel comfortable enough in the environment to offer their opinion.

In your practice you have 40 patients with type 2 diabetes who are also obese. You have counseled them extensively regarding diet and exercise. However, you feel that you haven’t made much progress in persuading your patients to make healthy lifestyle changes over the past several years. You have shared your frustration with your colleagues and have discovered that they are similarly frustrated. Realizing that this problem is bigger than you thought, you decide to study it further. You make plans to invite patients to attend a focus group that you will moderate. As you plan your study you wonder, how are focus groups supposed to work?

A focus group is a form of qualitative research. Focus groups have long been used in marketing, urban planning, and other social sciences.1 They were first employed in the early 1940s in an effort to move away from interviewer-dominated research methods and were extensively employed when trying to explore issues of morale among American troops during World War II.2 Focus groups have become increasingly popular in health care, especially in the realm of needs assessment.3 The focus group format has also found favour with those doing pilot testing for curricula, program improvement, organizational development, and outcome evaluation.

Essentially, a focus group involves the gathering of a group of people who are asked about their attitudes toward a concept, product, or idea. However, much misconception surrounds the concept of focus groups. It is easy to confuse focus groups with the many other methods of needs assessment and information gathering that involve groups. Public forums, nominal groups (a formal technique, which has been compared to the Delphi method, for identifying, discussing, and ranking issues in a group setting), hearings, task forces, and committees, for example, do not generally possess the defining characteristics of focus groups. Rather, a focus group consists of participants who are guided via a facilitated discussion. A set of open-ended questions initiates focus group discussions. The facilitator can steer the participants back to the focus group questions or go along with the direction of the focus group discussions, depending on the research questions posed. Focus groups concentrate on a clearly defined topic, and efforts are made to gather information and opinions from group members.3 Participants are free to talk with other participants—the setting is intended to be interactive.1 Focus groups are also clearly defined in size; they are usually composed (depending on varying definitions) of 7 to 10 people.2 Table 1 further lists the fundamental elements of focus groups.

Key characteristics of focus groups

As can be inferred from the above description, the focus group format has several advantages: it is relatively inexpensive. What is more, individuals are more likely to provide candid responses. Through facilitated discussion, participants build on each other’s ideas through “piggybacking”; in this way, the focus group is very useful for needs assessment and project evaluation purposes. Given their qualitative nature, focus groups allow researchers to look beyond the facts and numbers that might be obtained via survey methodology—researchers can learn or confirm the meaning behind the facts.1,3,4

At the same time, focus group methodology has its limitations. The focus group relies heavily on assisted discussion to produce results; consequently, the facilitation of the discussion is critical. The quality of the discussion depends on the skill of the moderator, who should be well trained and preferably from the target population, yet not affiliated with the researchers (to ensure impartiality). Focus group discussions should be audiotaped or videotaped in addition to the recording of field notes. All data should be transcribed verbatim. However, these large volumes of qualitative data might be difficult to analyze. While a focus group format prevents the dangers of a nominal group process, outspoken individuals can “hijack” and dominate a discussion. A further weakness inherent to the focus group format is its participant selection system—participants are self-selected and study results are therefore harder to generalize to the larger population.1–4

To conduct a focus group, a number of steps are suggested. The first is to clarify expectations: what is the purpose of the focus group and what information are you hoping to gather? Participant selection follows. Participants are selected based on common or diverse characteristics, depending on the research question. For example, in the above focus group, only obese patients with diabetes were invited, but there was diversity based on sex, income, and age. After the participants are invited, efforts must also be made to encourage attendance.1,3,4 It is important to choose a convenient location and to provide reminder notices, e-mails, and telephone calls before the focus group meets.

The questions developed for the focus group must be short, natural, and open-ended. Questions in focus groups have been noted to fall into 5 general categories: opening questions, introductory questions, transition questions, key questions (focusing on the main areas of concern), and concluding questions. Most of the focus group time is devoted to exploring and examining the key questions. In general, focus group discussions are 60 to 90 minutes long. Throughout the session, the moderator must facilitate the discussion and attempt to elicit participation from all members, ensuring that appropriate direction is maintained.

Why do you think it is so difficult for patients with diabetes to follow a specific diet and exercise plan? How do you think diabetes management could be more effective for patients? These questions are complex and without rigid, definable variables. They are answered best by qualitative methods in which the output is rich and textured, so that researchers can learn and confirm the meaning behind the facts. Of the many different qualitative methods, focus group discussions seem suitable, as they can produce useful data, introduce new theories, and illuminate various perspectives. However, as illustrated in the above case study and subsequent discussion, one should not run a study before considering which methodology is the most effective and appropriate to answer the study question. To obtain valid and meaningful results, focus groups must be conducted with a suitably defined purpose, proper structure, and appropriate rigour.

Competing interests

None declared

Hypothesis is a quarterly series in Canadian Family Physician, coordinated by the Section of Researchers of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. The goal is to explore clinically relevant research concepts for all CFP readers. Submissions are invited from researchers and nonresearchers. Ideas or submissions can be submitted on-line at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cfp or through the CFP website www.cfp.ca under “Authors.”

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