Conducting focus-group interviews

Flowchart nodes

• Conducting focus-group interviews

• Establish the group

• Develop your questions

• Conduct the focus group

• Analyse group data

• The group is made up of participants.

• It need not contain a fixed number of participants

• Screening produces a ‘sampling frame’.

• The participants should feel he or she are taking part in a free-flowing discussion,

• Recom-mend that you begin with a brainstorming

• General and positive questions which are easy to answer inorder to engage and reassure the participants

• To specific key questions which focus on the issue ofconcern and may be more challenging

• Follow-up questions in light of participants’ comments.Try to get to the heart of the matter

• Questions make sense and are respectfully expressed.Do they get the kind of response you want?

• Test out your questions with colleagues or friends, and revise themwhere necessary

• The responsibility of the moderator

• By organising a seating plan for the participants

•  That participants can make eye contact with one another as well as hear each other

• Arranging for the discussion to be recorded (on audio-tape or mini-disk, or even video),outlining the purpose of the meeting to the group, and so on.

• The single most important responsibility as moderator is to ask the research questions

• by introducing them appropriately

• probing further,

• pausing to let participants have their say,

• involving all participants and always remaining neutral and impartial

• Transcribing the tapes in order to produce an accurate record

• Exclude anycoughs, sneezes, he sitations, false starts, trip-ups and repetitions you hear, and feel free to correct speakers

• Include with each transcript other documents and an accompanying information you may have collected from each interview

• Tips for analysing your data

• Transcribe the interviews

• Type up significant notes

• Gather together transcripts, notes and other documents in apreliminary record

• Cut-and-paste your data into themes, patterns, trends, etc.

• Organise your categories into subcategories and arrange them in orderof importance

• Select and edit actual quotations to illustrate your emerging themes

• Think about investigating emerging issues further, perhaps by using alternative instruments