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3 Planning Your Research

Your staff is in place, you have contracted with research collaborators or consultants, and you have thought about what kind of community groups you might contact as potential partners. You have also made decisions about your timeline and budget. Now you are ready, as a team, to plan your research.

This chapter will provide guidance on the major decisions your team needs to make in developing your research plan: most importantly, the development of your overall research questions and the identification of the specific populations from which to recruit parents for the focus groups. It will also describe a process for collecting information about the operation of the programs and policies affecting low-income parents which are relevant to the subject of your inquiry.

How do you start?

Before any work can be done on your research plan, your team needs to:

Establish the goals of the project. What are you trying to accomplish by doing this research?

Identify the target audience for your research. Identifying whom you are trying to reach with your findings will influence such central aspects of the project as the research questions themselves, the target populations to recruit, and the location of the focus groups. It will also determine the format of your final report and the strategies you develop to disseminate it.

Review the basic principles of focus group methodology so that all staff understand them and appreciate their importance to the credibility of the research.

With that as a foundation, the team then can turn their attention to developing the project’s research questions, identifying the population from which participants will be recruited and selecting the locations of the focus group sessions.

What do you want to learn?

Your team will need to determine exactly what you want to learn through the focus groups so you can develop the research questions for your project. These overall questions are not to be confused with the actual questions put to participants during the focus group sessions. Research questions ask in broad terms what you want to learn about the participants’ experiences, perceptions, and opinions on a given topic. These questions must be closely linked to the goals of your project. Their development should take into consideration the needs of the target audience for your research.

Research questions are critical because they form the basis for so many aspects of the project: the identification of the population to be included in the focus groups, the communities in which the focus groups will be held, the content of the recruiting and screening instruments, and the development of the focus group protocol used by the facilitator during the sessions.

When developing your research questions, keep in mind the length of time you’re allowing for each session. It’s a good idea to limit your scope to no more than four or five research questions addressing one or two theme areas such as child care, health care or nutrition. Don’t be overly ambitious about what you can reasonably cover in the time allotted. Focusing on fewer research questions allows you to produce the kind of rich information focus groups can offer. (See Field Note.)

If you still have worries about the scope of your inquiry, you will have a chance to test whether you can cover the issues in the time allotted when you conduct your pilot session (See Chapter Seven for discussion about conducting a pilot.) It will be evident if you have been overly ambitious, and you can narrow your inquiry by eliminating or altering some of your questions.

Once you have settled on your research questions, you can then use them to write a protocol or script that probes for answers from participants. The development of the protocol (described in Chapter Four) can be time consuming and should begin as soon as possible.

Field Note

In our project on child care and child health insurance, we planned on sessions of no longer than one and a half hours. While child care was our primary focus, we initially planned on also asking parents about their experiences obtaining health insurance for their children and about their attempts to access health care services once they had insurance. Even before we conducted the pilot focus group, we realized we wouldn’t have time to deal adequately with all of these topic areas. We kept our focus on child care but limited our inquiry regarding child health care to the experiences of parents in obtaining health insurance for their children — that is, questions about outreach, eligibility, and enrollment.

What are the target populations of your study?

Use your newly developed research questions to help define the population you want to study and the groups within that broader population to invite to the sessions. Is your broader population families receiving housing subsidies? Is it families making less than $20,000 per year with at least one child under age five? Is it families using child care subsidies?

In establishing your criteria for participation, be careful not to exclude or include any group without considering what you may be losing or gaining in doing so. Take time to make these decisions or you will regret them later when you analyze your results. (See Field Note.)

Field Note

In our project on child care and child health insurance, our primary focus was the child care subsidy program. At our initial planning meeting, we decided to set our guidelines at 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL). Later, we did a closer examination of the income guidelines for child care assistance measured against the very high cost of living in one of the geographic areas we targeted. Local experts told us about the challenges of families who didn’t qualify, so we decided to change our criteria for participation to 225% of FPL in order to include more families in these circumstances. For them, the task of finding affordable child care may be especially difficult and their choice of care severely limited. If we had excluded them we would have missed gaining insight into the question of whether the guidelines for child care assistance are realistic. Another focus of our project was to explore issues of the working poor. Initially, we considered requiring that participants be working at least part-time. However, we realized that we would then miss the experiences of parents who might work if they were able to find affordable, reliable child care. By dropping the requirement and including both parents who worked outside the home and those who stayed at home with their children, we were able to determine whether the stay-at-home parents did so by choice or because they were unable to afford child care. As it turned out, we discovered that the great majority of these parents—both those who were single parents and those who had working spouses—said they would go to school or become employed if they could get child care assistance. We were able to uncover another piece of important information for policy makers assessing the adequacy of the child care assistance available to low-income families. In the end, we arrived at the following simple criteria for participation: • Parent or guardian of at least one child age 5 or under • Income at or below 225% FPL

How do you attract participants with a mix of experiences?

Once you have established the criteria for your broader study population, use your research questions to consider the mix of experiences within that population that you would like to see represented at the focus group sessions. Do you want to be able to compare single parent families with two parent families? Low-income families receiving housing subsidies to those without that assistance? Parents who work outside the home to parents who stay at home with their children?

These judgments will guide subsequent decisions (discussed later in this manual) regarding what your recruitment strategies will be, what screening questions you will ask, and how you will select and group participants.

Among many considerations in identifying these subpopulations, there are two that come up most frequently in planning the make-up of focus groups: geographic diversity and racial and ethnic diversity.

Geographic Diversity. Decisions on the location of your focus groups will be based largely on the experiences you want to capture. Examine the demographics and economic base of the different geographic areas of your state or community and look at your research questions in light of those factors. Consider where the subpopulations that interest you are more likely to be found. There also may be differences in how statewide programs are administered from county to county or region to region, and you may want to learn what impact those differences have on families. (See Field Note.)

Once you have thought of all the potential areas that might serve your purposes, you might narrow your choices based on other considerations. There may be an area of the state that has not received adequate attention from policy makers. Perhaps there are key state legislators you want to educate; conducting focus groups in their districts might be a way of attracting their attention. Such strategic factors are valid to consider as long as the ultimate decisions you make support your overall methodology.

Field Note

In our project on child care and child health insurance, we were interested in how the experiences of low-income parents trying to find child care might differ based on geography. By including both urban and rural locations, we captured an important distinction: while parents in Northern Virginia worried most about child care costs, parents in the rural areas spoke about the lack of any formal child care programs for certain age groups.

Racial and Ethnic Diversity: Racial and ethnic groups, non-English speaking groups, immigrants, and other subpopulations may reflect differences in experiences you will want to explore. In some locations the choice of subpopulations is fairly straightforward. However, in areas where there is a highly diverse population of foreign and native-born residents, your choices may be more complex. The community groups you enlist to help you set up the sessions may be able to guide you in these decisions.

The considerations of race/ethnicity and geographic diversity are interrelated. Depending on which factors are most important to your research questions, you may choose a geographic location because it is heavily populated with a particular ethnic group you want to recruit. Or, you may choose a geographic area to capture differences based on geography (urban versus rural) or programmatic policies, and then decide if there are specific ethnic or racial groups living there who should be recruited for your focus groups.

How do you learn about the operation of the programs that relate to your inquiry?

Unless you have adequate in-house expertise, it is helpful to schedule interviews with local experts on your chosen topics. You may have already recruited such experts for your advisory committee. The interviews should allow the team, particularly the facilitator, to understand both the theoretical and actual processes parents must go through to obtain and use services. Armed with such knowledge, the facilitator and research staff can grasp the significance of the stories parents tell without interrupting the narrative with questions about references to specific programs or agencies.

To understand how programs operate in theory and in practice, interview both state agency officials and legal services attorneys or other outside client advocates. Representatives of state agencies will know how programs are supposed to work. Those who represent the beneficiaries of these programs may give you better insight into how programs actually work.

Consider any biases these experts may have, however. State agency officials are less likely to identify flaws in the system while client advocates, who only see those beneficiaries who have encountered problems, may overstate the difficulties families face. Be sure to go into the focus group sessions with an open mind. Use the interviews to obtain information on issues that may or may not surface in the focus group discussions.

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