How to plan and run forucs groups

• 6 to 10 participants per group (never more than 10). Recruited using a specially designed selection questionnaire  
• A suitable room: quiet, minimal distractions, comfortable seating around a table so people can write, draw, look through pictures  
• Two digital recorders plus spare batteries (just in case) 
• A moderator to chair the discussion – keeping it on track and to time; ensure everyone gets chance to contribute, and nobody dominates the conversation 
• A single silent observer who can also help guide people to the room, the toilets, pick-up late comers, deal with unforeseen events and taking notes.  
• A ‘topic guide’ of 6 to 8 pre-designed questions  
• Stimulus material to aid the discussion – picture, prompt card, model etc  
• Basic refreshments – tea, coffee, water, biscuits, fresh fruit etc. Remember to provide vegan / gluten free options and check for allergies 
• Incentives for attending –paid after people have attended the focus group 

It is also possible to run focus groups via Zoom, Teams or Google Meets. In these cases you can offer a slightly lower incentive for participants and will not need to pay for refreshments. However, the quality of discussion is never as good as with an in-person focus group.  

A focus group is not a town hall meeting where anyone can turn up. The success of your focus group depends on the quality of your recruitment process. It is vital that the people who are invited genuinely represent the audience you are researching.  

Participants should be selected on the basis that they have certain characteristics in common. For example; they are all secondary school science teachers with at least 3 years’ experience; have taken students on at least one trip to a science centre within the past 5 years; and work in a school no more than 2 hours journey time from the science centre.  

You, or the recruiter you employ, need to draw up a ‘screener questionnaire’ that ensures the people you ask to attend meet the required characteristics.  

It is important you avoid selecting anyone who has a great deal more knowledge of the topic than the other participants. For example, if you are running a focus group with parents about a planetarium show, you would need to avoid selecting anyone with a degree in astrophysics. Otherwise, everyone else will defer to that person.  

As the moderator you have four key roles:  

1. Keep the discussion on track 
2. Use the questions and activities to elicit thoughtful and honest answers from the group 
3. Ensure everyone gets a fair chance to comment – encourage the more reticent members to contribute, and tactfully persuade the more talkative ones to give others a chance  
4. Keep to time – the session must finish at the agreed time 

At the start of the session ask everyone to briefly introduce themselves. Take a note of their names so you can direct questions at specific people.  

In a brief and friendly manner describe the ‘rules of engagement’. 

• You will be recording the session but only you / the person analysing the data will ever to listen to it. All comments will be anonymised, no names will be used in the report. The recording will be deleted once the data has been analysed 
• People don’t have to take turns or put their hands-up. But please only one person speaking at a time otherwise the recording is impossible to decipher 
• Fine for people to disagree with each other but they must do so respectfully 
• Fine for people to be critical - explicitly state that you won’t be offended 

The aim is to get participants talking to each other rather than to you. The real value of a focus group is that people hear other’s comments and are confident to express their own ideas. As moderator you should only be speaking occasionally to add new questions, introduce a new activity, probe for clarification, and ensure everyone gets a fair hearing.  

This is a list of questions you prepare in advance of the focus group. For a typical 90-minute focus group you will be able to ask around 8 to 10 main questions plus some additional probing questions in case people need further prompting. Have all the questions printed on one side of A4, so that you can glance at them during the discussion.  

As moderator you will guide participants through the questions but the order in which these are covered will vary, depending on the ebb and flow of the discussion. Often people will jump ahead and anticipate a question. At other times they will loop back and talk about an issue that has already been covered.  

Providing participants with a rich variety of visual material, and different ways to express their opinions will help get the most out of the focus group.  

If you are researching people’s response to an exhibition, or an online resource, you should give people a chance to look around it first, and have images / screen grabs to show during the discussion. 

If you are researching people’s response to a live event you might want to arrange for participants to see a performance, watch a video of the event, or at least try out some of the component activities. 

There are many examples of focus group activities which participants can be asked to complete individually, in pairs, or as a whole group. Depending on the aims of your research you could: 

• Ask them to fill in speech and thought bubbles on cartoons 
• Suggest endings to incomplete sentences 
• Select images they feel best represent their thoughts, feelings, ideas etc 
• Placing markers on a scale to indicate their opinion  

Remember, when using visual methods, to ask participants to describe what they have created and why they have chosen the imagery they have. Their intended meaning will not be apparent from the images alone.  

It is harder to get a free-flowing conversation and more difficult to show stimulus material. Online focus groups are harder to moderate, as turn-taking is more difficult to manage. There is also less rapport between participants as they have not had the opportunity to get to know each other. 

During Zoom calls you can use apps like Jam Board - where participants paste up virtual post-it notes; comments via the chat function; votes and polls. However, these activities are not nearly as much fun as those you can run in a live focus group session.