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]