How to Conduct a Focus Group
Focus group interviews provide an excellent source of information to help you improve your programs. Sometimes you need information to tell you how effective services have been and sometimes you need information to tell you what services you should include in a grant application. Focus groups can help you get information that is more in-depth than surveys in a very short amount of time. In formal research, there are specific, and often strict, guidelines to follow in conducting focus group interviews. However, for most program evaluation purposes, the guidelines are less rigorous, so anyone with an interest in program improvement can do it.
To conduct an informal focus group interview (not for formal research purposes), you’ll need to follow a few simple steps. First, develop the focus group protocol. This is a fancy way of saying decide on the questions that you want to ask. What do you want to know? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a particular group "won't know anything about that." You’d be surprised. Make your list of questions and ask at least two other people to review the list and give you some feedback.
Second, select your participants. There is no perfect size for a focus group, but the best groups usually have between six and eight participants. There are many ways to select people for your group. You can randomly choose from among your program participants (for example, select every 8th name on the list, etc.) or you can intentionally select people to invite. Keep in mind that the manner in which you select people for your group will have an impact on the results. If you select only parents who love your program, for example, the results will show that your program is terrific. This is nice, but you will get very little information to help you improve. Balance is a good word to keep in mind.
Third, hold your focus group. Conduct the interview in a comfortable setting. If you are going to tape the interview, make sure that all participants know this and agree to it ahead of time. Discuss confidentiality at the beginning of the interview and clearly explain how you are planning to use the results. Most focus groups designed to plan or improve school programs last between 45 minutes and an hour, although longer or shorter meetings can also be effective. If you want the opinion of people who are not native speakers of English, you’ll need to conduct the group in their native language or secure the services of a translator.
Finally, summarize the results. If you taped the interview, you'll want to have it transcribed, but you will also need to put together a brief summary of the results. This will help you combine your focus group results with the results of other evaluation measures.
