Focus Groups

Benefits of focus groups

1. they are a quick method;
2. they are helpful for collecting information on the group's attitude on a given subject, that would be difficult to obtain without interaction;
3. thay are useful for eliciting information on the characteristics of conversation.

Limits of focus groups

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. participants' answers are influenced by the social environment: in order to avoid conflict, their attitude is usually more polite and moderate compared to what they would show in one-to-one interviews;
3. it is difficult to generalize their output, 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 who are similar. Hence, to collect data on persons with different characteristics, it is necessary to run multiple focus group sessions;
5. results are difficult 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 too. ^[1]