The Uses of Focus Groups
Focus groups work particularly well to determine the perceptions, feelings, and thinking of people about issues, products, services, or opportunities. Here are some of the ways the information gathered in focus groups is used. These categories are not intended to be mutually exclusive or all-inclusive. Instead, they present a beginning way to think of the variety of uses of focus group interviewing.
Decision Making
Earlier we said that focus groups aren't used for decision making. Now we're saying they are. Here is the difference-when using focus groups, decisions are made after all the focus groups are completed, not in individual groups. Also, the decisions are made by designated decision makers using the findings from the focus groups, not by focus group participants. The focus groups are used to gain understanding about a topic so decision makers can make more informed choices.
Focus group findings have been used to advise decision making before, during, or after an event or program. When focus groups are used to gather information before a program, we call it needs assessment, asset analysis, a climate survey, planning, pilot testing, and so on. When focus groups are used during a program, we call it formative evaluation, process evaluation, feedback, monitoring, reporting, and so on. When they are used for decision making after an event, it might be called summative evaluation, outcome evaluation, or just feedback.
Product or Program Development
A slightly different way of thinking about focus group information is to consider the stages in product or program development. This model grows out of the commercial business and industry environment, but we have been cheerleaders for the idea in the nonprofit and public sector. We've illustrated the wrong way to plan in Illustration 1.1 and a better way to plan in Illustration 1.2.


There are three points in the development of a product or program when focus groups are helpful. The first, which is early in the development, is used to gain understanding-to see the issue through the eyes and hearts of the target audience. The goal of these focus groups is to learn how a target audience sees, understands, and values a particular topic and to learn the language used to talk about the topic. How do they think about it? How do they feel about it? How do they talk about it? What do they like about it? What do they dislike about it? What would get them to use the service or product or start or stop a behavior? What keeps them from doing it (breast-feeding), using it (your program), or buying it? Design experts then use these findings to create prototypes for the program or product. They develop several different designs of varying cost, intensity, duration, and so on based on what was learned from the first-phase focus groups.
The second series of focus groups pilot tests the prototypes the design experts came up with. Potential users are asked to compare and contrast each option. They are asked what they like and what they don't like.
The designers are then asked to take what they learned from the pilot test focus groups and design one best product or program design. If the redesign is major and there are substantial financial risks, additional focus groups might be used to test the final design before it is produced or implemented.
Focus groups can also be helpful after a product is on the market or a program is up and running. They can be used for evaluation. How can the product or program be improved? Does it achieve the expected results? What works well and what doesn't?
This three-stage process of focus group research was first used in the development of consumer products, but it has been helpful in many other areas as well. These stages have been beneficial in developing advertising campaigns, curriculum materials, logos, and social marketing efforts.
Customer Satisfaction
Focus groups are often used early in a customer satisfaction study to define the concept of satisfaction, identify the relevant ingredients of satisfaction, and discover the conditions or circumstances that influence satisfaction. Armed with this information, survey researchers can then design instruments that can quantify satisfaction by region, type of use, customer demographics, or other relevant variables. Designing the quantifiable instrument before listening to consumers has been found to be hazardous to organizational health and well-being.
Planning and Goal Setting
Some public institutions use focus groups to help them plan and set goals. They purposefully and systematically listen to clients and employees to learn how they see the organization and where it should head. What are its strengths? Weaknesses? What's missing? What opportunities exist? What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving in this particular direction?
Over time, organizations tend to institutionalize, streamline, or abridge planning processes, often with the best intentions. Unfortunately, these changes begin to fracture the relationship between the client and the organization. The client begins to feel that the organization is not responsive to his or her unique needs because the evidence used for planning by the organization is not visible and sometimes not understood or valued by the client. Ironically, the organization may be using sophisticated procedures for discerning public needs, but the individual perceives it as ineffective because there are no obvious indications that the organization is listening. In this environment, focus groups have two advantages. Focus groups not only yield valuable insights from customers and clients, but also convey that the organization wants to listen. There is a substantial difference to the individual between the organizational listening that occurs within a focus group and that which occurs in a public hearing or meeting.
Another way that organizations are using focus groups for planning is in identifying different scenarios that could result from policies, programs, future events, disasters, and so on. Focus groups composed of experts, often from differing backgrounds or disciplines, are asked to reflect on the aftereffects of these situations. Listening to others with differing expertise and allowing focus group participants an opportunity to interact can foster new insights and solutions not available by traditional strategies.
Needs Assessment
Arguably, one of the most difficult tasks facing a nonprofit or public organization is that of needs assessment. What seems so simple on the surface-a discovery of needs-is often remarkably complex. Focus groups have proven helpful mostly because they provide an interactive environment. Focus groups enable people to ponder, reflect, and listen to experiences and opinions of others. This interaction helps participants compare their own personal reality to that of others.
Needs are tricky because sometimes the need the sponsor wants to explore is only part of the problem. This is often the case when conducting employee needs assessments for training. An employer thinks, "We should train our people so they do more of X or less of X or do X better." But in focus groups, what begins as a listing of training needs quickly evolves into a discussion of what it would really take to get them to do more X or be better at X-changes in procedures, rewards and motivation, communications, and organizational culture. To organizational leaders, training and related education experiences are often seen as solutions, whereas the participants of focus groups regularly see a disconnection between the problem and the solution. Employers want to "fix" the people. The employees point to problems with the system. Training is one way of changing employee behavior, but employees are often frustrated by organizational barriers or a lack of incentives that thwart change.
Quality Movements
Focus groups have been helpful in developing and maintaining quality improvement efforts. These quality efforts depend on widespread involvement, open communications, feedback, and a nonthreatening environment. Focus groups are one of the strategies used to define quality, test monitoring procedures or solution ideas, and generally understand issues relating to quality.
Understanding Employee Concerns
Public and nonprofit organizations have many of the same types of employee concerns as other organizations. There are concerns about employee morale and motivation, incentives and barriers to productivity, influence of merit pay and compensation procedures, concern about how welcoming the environment is to different kinds of diversity, and a host of other topics relating to human resource development. Focus groups with employees have been helpful in understanding the perspectives of staff and also in identifying or testing potential policies or solution strategies.
Policy Making and Testing
In the past decade, a number of public organizations have used focus groups to help develop and test policy strategies prior to implementation. Focus groups have been helpful in identifying and understanding the criteria needed for successful rules, laws, or policies. Then, by using focus groups to pilot test the policies or procedures, the public organization can determine which options are easiest for the public to adopt or follow, easiest to understand, and easiest for the agency to enforce.
A Primary or Secondary Research Tool
Focus groups are used as a research procedure. Research, however, can be seen in a variety of ways with differing end results. For example, academic research is often conducted by students and faculty at institutions of higher education and seeks to provide insights that are shared through journals, papers, and books. By contrast, social marketing research is more similar to its cousin, marketing research, on the surface; it seeks to provide strategies for changing behavior in a socially desirable manner. Still another type-evaluation research-is aimed at helping program decision makers and answering public questions of accountability and worth of programs. Still another variation is participatory research, which places emphasis on involving people in a community in conducting the research, because of what the process does for that community in terms of developing commitment, capacity, and talents as well as improving utilization.