Focus Groups / FGs - A Comprehensive Guide
You find yourself at a table with your extended family on a birthday, or on Christmas Day. There is this topic that keeps popping up in your mind (politics, sports, whatever), and you want to find what people think about it. Of course, you might have your hypotheses, you probably read opinions on social media, but you didn’t talk directly with people about this topic. So, sitting at the table with your family you ask: “What do you think about this?”, everyone starts to give their opinion, you lean back and listen. Probably you have been at least once in this scenario, so congratulations, you are familiar with the basic idea of a focus group – put some people together, launch a topic and let them talk.
Clearly this is an extreme simplification of a focus group. In reality there are many things to decide upon and keep under control: whom you invite to the group, how many people, in person or online, what you ask and how you do it, what is the order of the questions, how do you make sure that everyone is comfortable and everyone talks equally, how do you keep a discussion of about 2 hours engaging (we bet you don’t remember when you last discussed a subject for 2 hours, it might become boring), what do you make of the data, how do you use that data for a larger measurement study.
We try to answer all these questions in this article, in an easy-to-read manner, a focus group introduction if you will (although we are sure you already read several introductions or you are about to).
So, grab a snack and let’s get started.
What are focus groups?
In the most basic sense, a focus group consists of 4 to 8 people who meet in a room for around 1.5-2 hours and talk about a subject, the discussion being conducted by a moderator. More than 8 participants (some brag about successfully engaging and collecting relevant information from as much as 10 participants in a focus group) does not allow everyone to speak up their minds, and you will most likely end with some participants taking an open eye nap during the discussion. Less than 4 participants gets another fancy name – a triad (not the organised crime one, though).
The focus group is a form of primary research, meaning that you collect original information by talking directly with respondents, you do not take the results from a study conducted by someone else and reuse them (which is the meaning of secondary research).
The focus group is also a form of qualitative research. A qualitative research doesn’t mean it has a high quality, as, unfortunately, you can also have pretty bad qualitative studies. Qualitative discovers qualities, or characteristics (e.g., motivation for using toothpaste may be health or fear of bad breath, which are qualities in the sense that we can only know that they exist, and there is no intrinsic quantity in them – one is no larger than the other).
Qualitative and Quantitative – Complements or Alternatives?
Qualitative research is the complement of quantitative research and probably the best way to distinguish between them is this: in a qualitative study you explore (e.g., find out an opinion you did not know before) and in a quantitative one you measure (e.g., how many hold an opinion you already know exists).
In a qualitative study you explore in-depth people’s opinions, attitudes, needs, in a less guided way, with the objective of gathering as many opinions as possible on a subject. You usually talk with few people, let’s say 10-40 people in total, depending on the complexity of your study, and, very importantly, you do NOT get info about the quantity of some opinions, you do not obtain percentages (occasionally, it can happen that you can make marketing decisions using only qualitative research, when the object you study is extraordinarily good or bad, e.g., an advertisement is so good that all respondents get spontaneously excited, or so bad that they all reject it strongly).
By contrast, a quantitative study consists of a fully guided questionnaire, with predefined lists of answers (and no or very few questions with open answers sprinkled throughout). Here, you do not usually find new things, you do not explore new territories, but you measure the opinions, attitudes, needs that you already know exist, on a large sample that gives you a representative view of the targeted population. Now you can have the percentages you need, with nicely coloured visualisations that will make your boss or your client appreciate your work.
When should focus groups be used?
Well, this question is better divided in two easier ones:
1. When should you use qualitative research?
2. When are focus groups useful in qualitative research?
1. When should you use qualitative research?
Basically, two main instances cover most cases:
a. When you need to find many details and get in-depth. For example, you want to launch an app. You need to understand how people use it, what it lacks, what they think about the colours, the menu, the functionality. You must let people talk and explore with a lot of “how and why” questions. This is the place to really have a conversation with them, not to apply a structured quantitative questionnaire where they have to adapt their ideas to your predefined lists.
b. When you crave for those sweet percentages from a quantitative study but need to construct a comprehensive questionnaire. It is more complicated than you think to generate exhaustive lists of opinions, attitudes, needs, reasons. You might think “I know the reasons why people come/do not come to my store/use my product, I just need to put them in a list and measure which are the most common”. The reality is that you don’t really know all the reasons (most likely you do not even know the main reasons, and, if you do, they will change before the next time you need to use them – this is why qualitative research is useful). Everyone lives in a bubble, you (and me) included, so most probably you will find things you did not think about in a qualitative study. It is these things that you add afterwards in your quantitative study, measure their incidence, find a new wave/trend nobody uncovered yet, develop a new action plan to take advantage of it, and thus gain a competitive edge.
2. When are focus groups useful in qualitative research?
There are many types of qualitative research (in-depth interviews, pair-depth interviews, focus groups, online communities, ethnographies), each having advantages and disadvantages, by use cases. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of focus groups.
The main benefit of a focus group compared with the other methodologies is the dialogue between respondents: brainstorming ideas, doing creative exercises, soliciting thoughts from respondents that otherwise would have remained uncovered.
If you want participants encouraged to explore and share their opinions and feelings, then the focus group is the right tool. Say you need to understand what women need for intimate hygiene. Put one woman face - to - face with an interviewer and you will not find anything! But put 6 women next to each other, encourage them to voice their feelings, and see how each of them becomes more and more open and vocal as the most courageous of them start breaking the taboos. These subjects are best approached with FGs.
As another example, you may want people to analyse an ad. One person mentions the music is suitable, but the product is not visible in the ad. Someone else mentions that one actor was acting too over the top. The first person did not think about the acting, but now that it was brought up, they realise they have their own opinion about the acting.
Or you want to understand how some brands are perceived by consumers and you do a creative exercise in which they imagine the brands as people: how they look, how they dress, what is their attitude, how they act in a certain scenario. One single consumer might give you some creative answers, but by having several people working together you obtain a much richer scenario.
What is the role of a moderator in a focus group? How do you know if the moderator is good or not?
The moderator is the person hosting the group discussion, asking the questions, and guiding the themes. The moderator’s main role is to make sure all the client’s information objectives are answered. For this they make use of a discussion guide, meaning a list of general questions, themes, prompts that they need to bring into the discussion.
But unlike a structured quantitative questionnaire, this discussion guide is very flexible, only a list of things to reach, the moderator has to make sure they adapt the guide to the actual discussion: A question doesn’t work or is misunderstood? The moderator must change it on the spot. An interesting theme or subject appears out of the blue and no one thought about it when writing the discussion guide? The moderator must recognize its usefulness and explore it. Did respondents already bring up a subject that was scheduled later in the discussion guide? The moderator must decide if it makes sense to explore it when it is brought up or return to it later. And so on.
Moderators are there for gathering info, not for entertaining the respondents or the clients who might watch the group.
Sometimes, the clients who pay for the FG consider they got their money worth if the moderator was a good performer. This is natural, as most of our organized experiences as human watchers are of performing arts. But the correct question to evaluate a moderator is not if we feel entertained, but if we feel entertained by the respondents, not by the moderator.
Being entertained by a moderator is rather bad for the FG, because when the opinions of the moderator are interesting, there is little to no chance of discovering anything else from the respondents in the FG.
The moderator’s job is to ask the questions. But the moderator’s art is to make respondents feel comfortable to open-up and speak freely, to actively listen and track the coverage of the information objectives, and to ask questions in the right context.
The moderator of a focus group must keep an impartial tone, not telling their own opinion even if sometimes it hurts, not siding with any respondent, not correcting any participant. They also must pay close attention to the focus group dynamics:
- Make sure that everyone talks equally.
- That participants speak one at a time.
- That the discussion is not boring.
- Make sure to temperate that person who always talks first and who talks the most (we call it a group leader, and every group has one; they have the power to unbalance the group dynamic and make the discussion about themselves; it is quite tempting for a moderator to let them talk because they give a lot of information, but at the same time it is not an interview and they should not be allowed to monopolise the discussion).
- If someone states an opinion, to not take it for granted and ask for others’ opinions on the matter.
- If most agree or disagree on something, the moderator could play the role of the devil’s advocate, this might help a respondent who had a different opinion but was afraid to vocalise it in front of several people who disagree.
How long should a focus group discussion be?
As you probably saw earlier, we said that in its most common form a focus group should last around 1.5-2 hours. This is the general consensus among the industry mainly because it is the sweet spot between cost and quality of information obtained from respondents.
If you ever thought about doing longer group discussions because you have so…o many subjects you want to explore, put yourself in the shoes of respondents:
- Longer than two hours and it would be harder to convince me to come to your group – you should accommodate my availability and multiply that by the number of participants.
- Longer than two hours and you must give me a break to go to the bathroom, walk a little, smoke a cigarette, so actually the duration increases considerably – you have to pay me more.
- Longer than two hours and it is more likely you won’t convince me, an active person, to come to your discussion. I work 8-9 hours a day, probably I have children, I don’t have the time. You probably will get a disproportionate group with less active people.
- Longer than two hours and it is more likely I will get tired of the discussion. The group takes place in the evening after people finish their work, and after a long day of work you expect me to concentrate for more than 2 hours and give you very insightful info I didn’t really think about before the group, be focused and coherent. Most probably after a period I will give you monosyllabic answer and pray that you will finally finish.
So, it may be a trap to think more time spent with respondents means more information. After all, this is a focus-group not a drag-group.
How many participants in a focus group – what is a good, typical size focus group?
We recommend around 4-8 persons in a focus group. 4-5 people are more common in an online group because a lot of time is wasted online on the pauses between each person talks, so 4-5 people online have as much time to answer as 6-8 persons in a face-to-face group. Also, 6 images on a computer screen (5 participants and one moderator) is comfortable for most people, but not more than that.
It all boils down to simple arithmetic – 120 minutes divided by 8 persons means around 15 minutes per person to talk, excluding the time the moderator speaks. So, if you have many things to discover in a group, it is better to have fewer people whom you explore in detail than more people who you only get a few answers from. Less is more, as with many things in life.
Now, we’ve had experience in the past with clients asking for groups of 15, 20 or more people – the only pro for this approach (and it is a stretch to even see this as a pro) is when you also want to get some quantitative weights – but at this point why bother with focus groups – go directly with a proper quantitative study which would be cheaper and more precise than a large focus group, or have an online community (bulletin board) which will offer you qualitative insights coupled with a few quantitative flavours over a longer period.
