Focus groups have all the advantages of a brainstorming session. A focus group may explicitly consider an issue such as the advantages and disadvantages of a proposed product design. Such a group consists of several minds working together to look at the issue, see what's understood about it and what is missing, find suspected patterns, get a sense of what it means and feels like, and in general - generate ideas. When the group member currently speaking runs out of ideas, another member may have something to say. Each member's speech or behavior may trigger ideas from other members. The group's ability to generate visibility into the issue and ideas about the issue is substantially more than the sum of the individual members' abilities (6 >> 1+1+1+1+1+1).
A focus group may implicitly react to an issue without the knowledge of the members. For example, the design of the chairs the group members are sitting on. The ruse for the focus group may be anything - like the product design mentioned above - but the moderator can stir the conversation towards how comfortable or uncomfortable the chairs are. This kind of focus group has significant elements of an observation-in-the-lab experiment, discussed later. Still, the same brainstorming-like advantages can be realized in the implicit focus group as in the explicit focus group.
As long as the goal of the current phase in the research is to generate ideas and hypotheses, to bring up creative directions of thinking, to identify problems, to prepare for a more accurate research phase - focus groups are an excellent option. But focus groups are normally rather small (around 10 people) and the members are selected according to specific considerations and not randomly. This means that by design a focus group does not correctly represent a large general population. We can’t generalize or extrapolate safely from what happens in a focus group. So if we think of the focus group as an information source capable of determining a decision or an action outside the realm of research - then there is trouble. Focus groups provide information upon which we can base a more focused research, not an action. For example, a quick Internet search brings up texts like "The focus group said there would be a market for ..." Such a statement indicates that someone is using the focus group as an clear indication about the outside world. A less worrying statement would be "The focus group indicated there might be a market for ...", which looks like a direction for a more focused market research.
Like in an interview, the focus group moderator must have good interpersonal skills, acting skills etc. Not very common traits. Even more than in an interview, the group moderator must be able to notice non-verbal communication, write it down, and respond mindfully. Furthermore, the focus group moderator needs to hear, see and respond to several people at the same time, whereas the superhero interviewer "only" needs to consider a single person at a time.
More than in an interview, the video recording should cover all the participants all the time, not only when they speak, to capture non-verbal responses to what the participant currently speaking says or does. Also, there shouldn't be a video-man moving the camera from one participant to the next, since this attracts attention and definitely influences people’s behavior. At best, there should be several stationary video cameras capturing all the participants all the time. Not very easy to do for every focus group in every research.
These demands regarding the moderator and the recording would be difficult to meet, but luckily, they are not quite as critical as for interviews. We define the purpose of the focus group as generating ideas that are the input for the next phase of a research. We don't use the focus group as the ultimate output of the research. Any imperfect results of the focus group phase can be caught in subsequent phases. The worst that can happen, if the moderator is not a superhero, is that fewer ideas will be generated or that the ideas will not be quite as well developed as they could have been. This may cause subsequent phases of the research, designed to confirm or reject the ideas, to be less conclusive. Imperfect interview data, used as the basis for the whole research results, may cause the research as a whole to generate false "knowledge." Imperfect focus-group data, used as a trigger for a more specific research phase can at most mean the research as a whole doesn't generate useful knowledge, which isn't fun, but not nearly as bad as generating fallacies.
Bottom line: A great tool for poking, prodding and generating creative ideas. As in every tool of every trade - use only for the advertised purpose.
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