Focus Group
A focus group consists of selected individuals who are brought together to discuss specific topics. Under the guidance of a focus group moderator, participants freely express their feelings and opinions about provided topics. The size of a focus group is usually six to twelve people and its discussion usually lasts for sixty to ninety minutes.
Advantage
Anthropologists use focus groups to find reasons why people feel the way they do about particular issues. For example, if a researcher wants to know why people withdraw from an adult ESL program in a community, it may be effective to ask a focus group when they find it difficult to come to classes. Anthropologists also use focus groups to investigate the process of people’s decision-making. For example, if the researcher asks the adult ESL students what services are important factors that aid in attending the classes, they will evaluate the support services through discussion. Therefore, the researcher discovers how people decide which services are beneficial for them. Focus groups enable anthropologists to collect a large amount of ethnographic information in a short period. Although transcribing the data is time consuming, conducting focus groups is faster than interviewing the same number of people separately.
Disadvantage
In order to run successful focus groups, anthropologists need to select participants who are homogenous in social status, interests, and knowledge related to research topics. It is easy for participants to express their views when they share similar characteristics. One of the disadvantages of focus groups stems from this selection criteria. Instead of randomly sampling potential participants, anthropologists need to deliberately select individuals. However, a researcher can minimize this disadvantage by becoming familiar with a community and drawing adequate numbers of people who represent the community.
Another disadvantage has to do with reliability. In general, researchers should be able to obtain the same results from their research when they use the same methods. Since each focus group is unique depending on the combination of participants, anthropologists may obtain different results from several focus groups. In order to minimize this disadvantage, a researcher needs to master effective moderation of focus groups and careful analysis of the data. In this way, the researcher can get similar results from all focus groups.
This page was created by a Minnesota State University, Mankato student. Last updated 11/14/04.