Recently, I attended a focus group training facilitated by Dr. Richard Krueger and Dr. Mary Anne Casey of the U of MN School of Public Health. The training was centered on a book that the presenters had written titled, Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research (2000), specifically highlighting a chapter titled, “Focus Group interviewing”.  They incorporated real life examples from the hundreds of focus groups that they themselves have conducted. I have summarized below, three of their introductory points to successfully conducting and analyzing focus groups.

Key lessons learned:

1) The first few minutes of a focus group are crucial. In order for participants to be comfortable sharing stories or information later in the focus group, “the moderator must create a thoughtful, permissive and non-threating environment.” Some strategies that the moderator can incorporate to be perceived as a person who is open to hearing anything include:

  • setting ground rules
  • stating that there are no wrong answers
  • sharing an opening ice-breaker question

After the ground rules have been laid out, and once the icebreaker question has been discussed, participants should be more open to discussing the topic at hand.

2) Drs. Kruger and Casey suggest using “question routing” where questions are sequenced from very general to the most specific. Questions should also be in a conversational format; the goal of a focus group is not to reach consensus or to discover a single solution, but to gather the range of opinions and experiences (p.381, Krueger and Mary Ann Casey).

3) If you want to apply a basic strategy to identify themes and patterns over multiple focus groups, you may use a method called Constant Comparative Analysis; otherwise known by Drs. Kruger and Casey as the Classic Analysis Strategy: Long Tables, Scissors, and Colored Marking Pens.

Do you have any additional information you would like to provide for individuals learning to facilitate focus groups? What kind of ice breaker questions do you find useful? Please share and stay tuned for an additional article on focus groups from my colleagues who attended a session on focus groups at the Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute Spring Training.