Focus Groups

can spontaneously talk with each other, since the focus group session runs in an interactive setting.

Focus group methodology is often used as well in marketing as in social science, because it is an important tool for getting information about the potential market acceptance of a new product or the group's reaction to the topic the session is focused on.

Some benefits of focus groups:

1. they are a quick and cheap method;
2. they are helpful for collecting informations on the group's attitude on a given subject, that would be less accessible without interaction;
3. thay are useful for eliciting informations on the features of conversation.

Some limits of focus groups are:

1. to be effective, they need a skilled moderator to conduct them, who has to balance the freedom and spontaneity of the conversation against the focus on the topic;
2. they don't provide informations on individual opinions, since the social environment influences the answers of participants: in order to avoid conflict, their attitude is usually more polite and moderate compared to what they show in one-to-one interviews;
3. they aren't meant to generalize, since the number of participants is not large enough to be representative of the whole population.
4. to limit the self-censorship, the group should be composed by people with similar features. Hence, to collect data on persons with different characteristics, it is necessary to run multiple focus group sessions;
5. resluts are not easy to analyse (sessions are usually audio taped and trascribed).

Problems and criticism However, focus groups also have disadvantages: The researcher has less control over a group than a one-on-one interview, and thus time can be lost on issues irrelevant to the topic; the data are tough to analyze because the talking is in reaction to the comments of other group members; observers/ moderators need to be highly trained, and groups are quite variable and can be tough to get together. (Ibid.) Moreover, the number of members of a focus group is not large enough to be a representative sample of a population; thus, the data obtained from the groups is not necessarily representative of the whole population, unlike in opinion polls.

A fundamental difficulty with focus groups (and other forms of qualitative research) is the issue of observer dependency: the results obtained are influenced by the researcher, raising questions of validity. The issue evokes associations with Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle. As Heisenberg said, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Indeed, the design of the focus group study (e.g. respondent selection, the questions asked, how they are phrased, how they are posed, in what setting, by whom, and so on) affects the answers obtained from respondents. In focus groups, researchers are not detached observers but always participants. Researchers must take this into account when making their analysis (Based on: Tjaco H. Walvis (2003), “Avoiding advertising research disaster: Advertising and the uncertainty principle”, Journal of Brand Management, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 403-409).