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4 Focus Group Documents

Your overall research questions have been chosen, target populations and geographic locations selected, and background information gathered. Now you are ready to develop the documents that will govern the process of conducting the focus group sessions. This chapter will outline principles to keep in mind while working on these materials and discuss in detail what each document will include and accomplish.

What materials/instruments do you need to create?

You’ll need to develop the following documents with which to recruit and screen parents and conduct the focus group sessions (Samples of each are included in the Appendices):

Project description: Describes the purpose of the project, the subject of your inquiry and the way in which you will collect the information to insure consistency throughout your series of focus groups.

Recruitment materials: Flyers and posters encouraging potential participants to call about attending a focus group session.

Screening form: Script of basic questions to help the screener determine whether the caller fits the criteria for participating in the focus groups.

Registration form: Filled out by participants before the focus group discussion to collect such detailed information as the ages of the children, income, and family size to be used later for analysis.

Protocol: Introductory script and series of questions to be used by the facilitator during the focus group to describe the process, direct the conversation, and gather information from participants.

Consent forms: A form promising confidentiality that is signed by participants.

What issues arise in composing focus group instruments?

Keep these general guidelines in mind when drafting all of your focus group materials:

Education level. Use language simple enough to accommodate varying education levels among the parents in your target population.

Avoid unintended messages. Do not use words that could bias the make-up of the group of parents who participate in your focus groups. For example, your recruitment and screening materials should say that you are interested in hearing about families’ experiences with a given program. Such language conveys a neutrality that tends to attract parents with a mix of experiences and avoids suggesting that there is a specific viewpoint you want to hear. Never say that you are interested in hearing about the problems or challenges parents are having with that program.

Be sensitive. If you are asking about income, provide parents with the opportunity to specify an income range—with a choice of weekly, monthly or annual figures—instead of asking them for a specific amount. Indicate whether you want the parent’s income or the family’s household income.

Allow self-identification. Permit callers to identify their own race and ethnicity, if you are asking for that information, instead of forcing them to fit into a previously established list of ethnic and racial groups.

What will the specific instruments look like and accomplish?

Project description. This document describes the purpose of the project and the methodology you will employ. It is used to explain the project in a consistent way to all focus group participants so they will understand the nature of the study in which they will be involved. You can also adapt it for use with the community groups you hope to work with at the local level by adding a list of the questions you need them to help you answer, the ways in which you plan to recruit parents, and the functions they might serve—such as arranging child care, acting as screeners, or providing a site for the focus group sessions.

Recruitment materials. Depending on your recruitment strategy for attracting parents, you will need to produce posters and/or flyers for use in the community. Here are some suggestions for developing these materials:

Involve the community groups you are working with in the design of your recruitment materials.

Effective flyers are bright and eye-catching. Try not to include so much information that the flyers look busy; a casual viewer may miss the message.

Briefly describe the topic of the focus group discussions. For example, “We Need Parents to Talk about Their Experiences in Looking for Child Care!”

Include the amount of the stipend you plan to pay participants and the availability of child care, transportation, and refreshments to attract potential participants.

To increase trust, include the name of the local community group who will be sponsoring the project with you.

List the very basic criteria for participation (for example, at least one child aged 5 or under and a family income under $25,000 per year).

Include a phone number that interested parents can call to find out if they meet the criteria for selection. Your community group can help you decide whether the population being targeted would be comfortable calling a toll-free number or whether using a local number would be more effective. (See Chapter Six for a fuller discussion of this issue.)

Do not use language that suggests that parents will automatically be invited to participate if they call the number.

Do not include the location of the session on the recruitment materials to avoid having unscreened or uninvited parents show up.

Do include the anticipated length of the sessions and make it clear that you are asking parents to participate in only one of the sessions. You could say, “You may be invited to participate in one of a series of two hour discussion sessions . . .”

CAUTION

Attracting participants can take a long time, so don’t delay developing recruitment materials until all issues are resolved. For example, if you haven’t decided what phone number to use for follow-up and screening you can always add the number later before the flyers are copied and posted.

Screening tool. The screening instrument is used by staff responsible for talking to the parents who call after seeing the recruitment materials. The document has three main functions that flow directly from the decisions you have made about the target and subpopulations you want to reach:

It provides for a consistent, standardized script so that all parents are presented with the same information. A script lessens the chance that staff will say something on their own that could bias the results of the focus group session.

It lays out the threshold criteria for participation. (Is their income below $25,000 a year? Do they have a child aged 5 or under?) If the caller does not meet these criteria, he or she cannot participate.

It includes questions about any additional information you need to select participants who represent a mix of circumstances and demographic factors (for example, on TANF, on TANF in past two years, never on TANF; or on Medicaid, privately insured, uninsured). If your research questions are fairly narrow, your threshold criteria may be all you need to make selections. In that case, you can confine your screening only to questions that get at that basic criteria. However, most research questions in focus groups involving this population are broader in scope. Soliciting information during screening on a variety of circumstances will offer the best basis from which to select participants and form your focus groups.

When developing the screening tool, keep in mind the following:

Be sure to include an explanation of the purpose of the project and assurances of confidentiality, not only regarding what is said in the sessions but in relation to all information given in response to this or any other focus group instrument.

The instrument should prompt screeners to ask the caller’s permission before they begin asking questions. This gives callers the opportunity to opt out of the process if it makes them uncomfortable.

Keep the screening tool as short as possible.

Define the terms used so that all respondents have the same understanding of what is being asked. For example, if you use the term “child care” intending it to mean any care provided while a parent works or goes to school, make sure you have the screener explain that. Otherwise, the parent may think you are only referring to more formal child care arrangements.

Tell callers about any stipend you are providing and ask them about child care and transportation needs if those incentives are offered. If they request child care, ask them whether their child has any special needs so you can plan accordingly.

In order to gauge the effectiveness of your recruitment strategies, it is helpful to include a question asking callers how they heard about your project.

Registration form. The registration form is filled out by participants at the beginning of the focus group session. If a parent is unable to read, a staff member can read the form to the parent and enter the information. It provides researchers with basic demographic, background, and program-specific information needed for the analysis of the focus group findings. The procedure insures that all information is collected uniformly and that time is not wasted during the session itself asking each participant to provide these details. It also serves as a method of gathering information on potentially sensitive topics—income, total hours a child is in child care—that participants may be reluctant to share in the group. Later, during analysis of the focus group transcripts, statements of the participants can be matched with information on the registration form to better understand their experiences.

Here are some suggestions for developing this form:

Choose your questions carefully. You do not want to overwhelm parents with a lengthy and complicated form.

To measure the opinions of participants, you may want to ask them to respond using a scale. For example, “On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most satisfied and 1 being the least satisfied, rate your satisfaction with the process of enrolling in Medicaid.”

If one of the purposes of conducting focus groups is to make contact with parents and engage them in your work, you might want to make sure you have a way of reaching them after the focus group session.

In addition to asking for their own contact information, you also might want to ask for the name and phone number of someone who could reach them if they move. (See Chapter Eight for more on parent engagement)

Provide a place on the registration form where participants can ask to have a copy of the final report of the focus group findings sent to them.

Field Note

In our special needs project, we found the registration document especially useful because we needed detailed information about the various conditions of the children. On our screening form, we included a few very general questions about the diagnosis of the child with special needs and the parents’ concerns about their child’s development. The registration form gave us the opportunity to ask more detailed questions about the nature and severity of the disability—information that later allowed us to do a more complete analysis of the focus group findings.

Focus group script/protocol. The script (or as researchers term it, “protocol”) determines the content of the discussion within each group. It contains a list of probing questions designed to elicit answers to your broader research questions. Research questions are rarely asked directly in the focus group sessions. Instead, composing the script involves considerable thought about what specific probes would best get at the broader questions you want answered for the project.

For example, if you want to know why parents are not using child care centers, you would never ask that question directly. Doing so might imply that you favor center-based care and are challenging the decisions parents have made for their children. Giving the impression that you are injecting your own value judgment into the discussion would undermine the neutrality of your research and inhibit parents from speaking freely about their experiences. A better way to get at this question would be to ask in a neutral way what kind of child care arrangements they have; then ask them to talk about their reasons for choosing that child care and whether it is meeting their needs and those of their child.

Your facilitator, especially if he or she is experienced in conducting focus groups with low-income families, will be an invaluable source of help as you develop the protocol. Involve the facilitator throughout the drafting process. In preparing the protocol questions, keep the following considerations in mind:

The protocol should begin with an introductory section to provide information about the sponsoring organization, introduce staff, explain the purpose of the focus groups and assure participants that their identities will be kept confidential. It should also include the fact that the sessions are being taped.

Except for changes in the protocol based on what you learn in the pilot focus group session, the same questions need to be addressed in the same sequence in all groups; the greater the consistency, the easier it will be to analyze the findings. Still, within these parameters, the facilitator should be free to probe more deeply if the parents’ responses to a particular question warrant further inquiry.

To elicit the richest possible information and make the most efficient use of the time allotted make sure your team takes the time to discuss at length how questions are to be asked and the types of answers they are likely to generate. (See Field Note.)

Never ask “yes” or “no” questions.

“Why” is rarely asked in focus groups because it tends to imply that there is a right or wrong answer making participants feel judged. It is better to ask “what” or “how” participants feel about the topic.

Consider the experiences of all participants in your focus groups. For example, when questions are asked about parents’ opinions of the child care their child is receiving, stay-at-home parents may have no- thing to contribute. Acknowledge that fact and follow with questions relevant to their situation.

Avoid asking about general satisfaction with services—you may only get less fruitful “yes” or “no” answers. Instead, ask specific questions that allow participants to tell their stories and provide rich detail about their experiences.

Field Note

In our project on child care and child health insurance, we found that it was very important to keep our target population and their particular circumstances in mind when developing the protocol. For example, to help us gauge parents’ satisfaction with the care their children were receiving, we could have asked the general question, “What do you look for in a child care setting?” Given the economic circumstances of the target population, however, we worried that we might get responses that referred only to their most immediate and practical concerns: cost, transportation, adequacy of coverage of their work hours. We may never have discovered what value they might place on factors that more directly affect their children, such as learning activities or the degree to which individual attention is provided by child care staff. Accordingly, we decided to separate out questions about how the child care they were using was meeting their needs from questions about how it was serving their child’s needs. We first asked, “Does your child care arrangement work for you?” This brought references to such concerns as coverage of work hours, flexibility, cost, and transportation. Then we asked, “Does your child care work for your child?” To follow up on that question, we also asked “What would you want in a child care arrangement for your child?” “Is there anything you would change about the child care program your child is in?” By asking these questions, we were able to obtain insights into how these parents felt about their child’s experiences in child care—information we might have missed entirely if we had asked the more general question.

Consent forms. To insure that parents are participating in the focus groups with informed consent, you need to develop forms for parents to read and sign before the focus group discussion begins. Consent forms should:

Outline assurances of confidentiality.

Describe the procedures the research team will follow to protect the identity of the participant. (See more on these procedures in Chapter Seven under “Ethical Obligations to Participants.”)

Inform participants that they have the right to withdraw from the discussion at any time, without penalty, should they become uncomfortable with the subject matter.

Ask parents to keep confidential anything said by other parents during the focus group discussion.

Field Note

When we were screening parents for our special needs project one parent said she wanted to participate but was concerned that there might be another parent from the same child care program her child attended in the focus group session. If that turned out to be the case, she feared that any concerns she raised about her child’s care would get back to the child care staff and she would lose her child care. This raised two issues: the critical need to reiterate to participants their obligation to keep what’s said in the session confidential and the need, wherever possible, to choose parents who have no such connection to each other when forming your focus groups. (See Chapter Six for a discussion of how to group and select participants.)

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