Focus Group

There is a lot of nonsense out there about focus groups. They've come to be so misdescribed that they have come to mean a bunch of people in a room talking about something. Actually, a focus group is a group interviewing technique consisting of between 6 and 12 people (more or less depending) who are carefully screened according to specific criteria and who are led through a carefully designed list of questions by a trained moderator.

A focus groups is a qualitative research technique. The best uses are for understanding how people think about things that can be seen or heard or felt. You cannot predict from a focus group to a larger population. That is, you can't say that because 4 of 12 people in a focus group said a certain thing, 33.3% of the population think or believe something.

It's dangerous just to do one focus group. Say you want to know how teens aged 16 to 19 react to a certain kind of food. Doing just one group may be misleading. Two or three groups would give you a much better read.

Focus groups can be very useful and in some cases are best. Good uses are for testing advertisements, reactions to food (as above), acceptance to new products, and so forth. For anything that must be personally experienced.

I suspect as we go down the road web-based tools will be able to do a lot of the things focus groups used to be the best things for.

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