Focus Group

Focus Group is one of effective research methods used to collect information and opinions from other people. It is a form of qualitative research in which group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. The number of people in a focus group is from 6 to 12, but the ideal number is 8 people. It can understand as and group interaction to collect data, self- experiences and find out why and how people think that way.

The method is conducted in an informal and natural way where respondents are free to give views from any aspect around the topic. The facilitator will prepare the questions following the topic and ask for people idea and suggestion about that. The advantage of the research method is that you can have rich information from lots of people at the same time. It can generate more critical comments as compared to having one-to-one interviews. Interaction between participants in focus group can be used to encourage research participants to generate and explore their own questions and develop their own analysis of common experiences.

Beside that focus group also have disadvantage like social disability effect- people shy to speak out if their opinion is different from others. During the discussion maybe there are some people disagree with other’s idea. If it turns into serious situation, the facilitator will need to calm them down. For some topic, if the target audience is children at young age, it’s also a challenge to conduct the discussion.

We did a focus group discussion last week. The facilitator is one of our friends and the topic is her FYP topic “Evolution of the Earth”. She opened the discussion by asking us after 500 years what would happen: technology, environment, society etc. We spoke out lots of our opinion and suggestion for her. But I noticed that there’s one our friends didn’t really say out anything. Because she said everything she was going to say, we all spoke out already :/ So we didn’t really get any of her sharing about the topic. It’s also one of the disadvantages of this research method.

Anyways, I still vote for this method because of the richness of information that I can gather during a short period of time. J