Focus Groups

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 difficult to obtain 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. results are not easy to analyse both because sessions must be audio taped and trascribed and because the issue is influenced by the moderator, who participates in the session as well. ^[1]