Focus groups and Moderators

Focus Groups

The purpose of focus groups is to enable stories; especially yours.

A focus group proceeds from individual stories - what do you do and why? - to an emerging set of representative stories – a kind of story segmentation – the simplest example being: the story of why people like you; the story of why others don’t; a story of indifference; and hopefully an emerging story of how to change or improve peoples’ response to you.

I’m not going to overdo the mechanics. We get a group of people who have something in common as a target group (users, buyers, voters, workers, etc.) but who also have significant differences (gender; age; education; user/non-user, etc.) and we get them to talk to us.

So we can get to know them; know them as engaged in the creation of your story.

Moderators

As a focus group moderator, the projects seem not to follow – one week its consumer product advertising, the next week it’s crisis and issue management for the public sector, the week after its recruiting and retention for a construction company, followed by (two in a row!) recruiting and retention but this time for healthcare. And so it goes. Or has gone for these thirty years.

The reason researchers can range across this vast territory, it is often claimed, is because we don’t have to be subject experts - we are process experts. I suppose, there’s some truth in that because methodology does give us a leg up when it comes to structuring research for any given client. But a deeper probe of focus group research will show that a good moderator is one who brings out peoples’ stories.

It’s the responsibility of the moderator to be a real person with his own true story engaging other human beings in a community of common interest. The honesty and integrity of the focus group depends critically on the respondents building trust in the moderator as a spokesperson for their needs, wants, preferences and commitments.

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer; and I was paid to be one for ten years at CBC, writing dramas and documentaries for the network. One of the reasons I love being a focus group moderator is that I am still just being a writer: helping people to express themselves and articulate their needs, wants and preferences. But good writers take their ideas where they find them.

Good focus group moderators have more than process (depth questioning, etc.) and what they have is an understanding of people sufficient to create frameworks of a higher order than mere counting and recounting. A good moderator is a real person with a story who engages others.