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7 Conducting the Focus Groups

You have chosen your focus group participants and made final phone calls to remind parents to attend. This chapter will prepare you to conduct the focus group sessions. It describes the equipment and supplies you need, the structure of the discussion, the role staff members play, the advantages of testing with a pilot group, and your ethical obligations to the parents.

What supports do participants need at the sessions?

First, make sure the following supports for the participants are in place:

Child care. Offer child care, preferably in an adjoining room, while the parents are in the sessions.

You may need to recruit child care workers and pay them. If you use volunteers instead, try to arrange for a professional child care worker to supervise them—especially if you expect any children with special needs.

Refreshments. Serve pizza, sub sandwiches, or some other convenient food, beverages, and dessert; make sure you have enough for the children.

Transportation assistance. Depending on the location of your site, you may arrange for a volunteer with a van to pick up parents and bring them to the session. This worked well in one of our sites where traffic problems made it difficult for parents to get there on their own. In rural areas where distances are greater, offering to reimburse for mileage may be particularly important to insuring attendance.

Stipends. Stipends (usually $25 to $50) probably provide the greatest incentive for attendance, so be sure to consider the appropriate amount for your location. The level of stipend will vary across the country, but within the same state, you should pay the same stipend to everyone. Stipends should be paid in cash, not checks.

How do you publicize the focus groups through the sources you’ve selected?

Once you have decided on the best sources for locating parents, you need to determine the most effective ways to publicize the focus groups. Again, your community groups will be an important source of advice about which methods might be most effective with the parents in their community. (See Appendix E for a list of the types of sources you mightuse for recruiting low-income parents and ideas for publicizing your project.)

Once that’s decided, your last step in the recruitment phase is to distribute your publicity materials to all the sources you have identified. You may also be able to give presentations to likely groups of parents. The staff of the community groups should be able to help you with this part of the process.

What equipment or supplies are necessary to conduct the focus group sessions?

At the session, you will need:

• portable tape recorder;
• extension cord and back-up batteries;
• sensitive microphone;
• extra audio tapes;
• registration forms;
• consent forms;
• nametags and/or place cards or “tents” for the facilitator and participants to place in front of them at the table;
• pads and extra pens for note takers;
• napkins, plates, and serving utensils;
• refreshments brought with you or delivered to the site;
• child care equipment, if not supplied at the site (videos, toys);
• outreach materials appropriate to your target population;
• tissues in case someone becomes emotional during the discussion;
• cash stipends in individual envelopes; and
• cash to pay the child care workers if you are not using volunteers.

What is involved in setting up before the sessions?

Have your staff arrive at the site at least one hour in advance to allow time to set up the room, arrange the child care, and meet the community group staff. Before the session:

Set up the table. Arrange the focus group table so that all participants have eye contact with each other and with the facilitator. Test whether the mike and the tape recorder can pick up voices at different distances around the table.

Set up the refreshments. Lay out the refreshments in a location away from the focus group table, if possible. It works best to have participants eat before the discussion begins.

Greet the parents. In the half hour you have allowed before the 90-minute discussion, have a staff member greet the parents as they arrive, show them where the child care is being provided, offer refreshments, and explain the forms they need to fill out. Your note taker and observer might share these responsibilities.

Determine eligibility. For any parents who show up uninvited and therefore unscreened, be sure to quickly check their registration form after they fill it out to determine if they meet your criteria for participation in the focus groups. (See Chapter Six for a discussion of the inclusion/exclusion of uninvited parents.)

Distribute name tags and place cards/tents. Parents should be provided with name tags and place cards or “tents” to use on the focus group table to help the facilitator, note taker and observer properly identify them when they speak. Using the list of participants supplied by the screeners, write only the first name of each parent to preserve confidentiality.

How does the facilitator manage the session?

A skilled facilitator is the key to success for any focus group project. Traits of a good facilitator are:

• an ability to listen and think at the same time;
• an ability to use everyday language;
• being sufficiently knowledgeable about the topic being discussed to be able to follow-up on parents’ statements;
• having the interpersonal skills to make parents feel comfortable and engender their trust; and
• possessing the skills needed to direct the discussion so it stays on track but does not lose the casual feel of a conversation.

The session should proceed as follows:

• Introductions. Once the session begins, the facilitator should introduce or re-introduce himself or herself, as well as any other staff people who will be in the room during the session.
• Purpose of project. The facilitator should go over the purpose of the project and provide the names of the sponsoring organizations.
• Use of an icebreaker. Start the questions with an icebreaker. Our facilitator asked participants to introduce themselves and tell the group one thing they have learned since becoming a parent. She first answered that question herself in order to put the parents at ease.
• Reminders to parents. Once everyone is introduced, the facilitator should inform participants that their conversation is being recorded, that all discussions will be kept confidential, and that they have an obligation to keep information they hear from other participants confidential. She or he should review the goals of the session and answer any questions. Parents should be reminded to speak up and talk one at a time to insure that their voices are picked up by the tape recorder.
• The discussion. The discussion then proceeds according to the protocol, with participants answering questions and the facilitator engaging participants who may seem reluctant to speak. While following the protocol, the facilitator needs to be lexible enough to ask follow-up questions when appropriate. Assign the observer the task of keeping track of the time so that the session will end when promised.
• Identifying speakers. The transcriber of the tapes will have a much easier task if the facilitator manages to identify speakers by their first name each time they speak.

CAUTION

Our transcriber for our special needs project told us that when portions of a focus group tape are unintelligible, it is usually because people were talking over each other. If this seems to be happening during the session, your facilitator should remind participants of the importance of not interrupting each other.

What roles do the note taker and observer play? The note taker captures in writing as much detail as possible during the conversation. The observer is present to record the nonverbal cues—nods, shrugs, and such facial expressions as surprise and sadness—that supplement the words parents use to describe their perceptions and experiences. Either the note taker or the observer can operate the tape equipment.

These notes and observations serve three purposes: 1.) they provide a back-up should the tape recorder fail or the tapes contain gaps; 2.) they provide a way for the transcriber to identify who is speaking on the tape; and 3.) they provide a written record of what was communicated verbally and nonverbally which can help the person analyzing the information gain a more complete picture of what went on in the discussion, to supplement the transcriptions of the tapes.

The note taker and observer should be seated away from the group and never be involved in the discussion in any way. They should not distract the participants, interrupt the group, or use such body language as nodding their head, or frowning, that would convey their opinion of anything the participants say. This is not to say that they need to be expressionless. Consistency is the key. It’s fine to act warmly and look interested as long as it’s done in response to all of the participants’ comments. It may help to arrange a onverbal signal that can be used unobtrusively to alert the facilitator if a participant is speaking too quietly to be picked up by the microphone.

The note taker needs to develop a system to identify the participants when they speak while at the same time preserving their confidentiality. One approach is to write down the first initial of the speaker’s first name and the first three words they say every time they speak. This method will provide a back-up to the identification of speakers on the tape; in a lively discussion it may not be possible for the facilitator to identify participants by name each time they talk. If there are two participants whose first names start with the same letter, you can code these with a number as well (T1 and T2.) The transcriber listening to the tapes of the sessions can then accurately identify who is speaking using the same coding method.

What happens at the end of the session?

Thank all the parents for their contributions. If a report on the findings is being printed, remind participants that they may have a copy sent to them so they will have a sense of what happens next in the project and feel included in the process.

Before parents leave, the logistical coordinator should provide them with the cash stipend and make outreach materials available. (See the discussion on use of outreach materials later in this chapter.)

Should you conduct a pilot focus group?

It’s always a good idea to conduct a pilot focus group. Pilots provide researchers with an opportunity to debrief afterwards and decide what worked and what did not. Such instruments as the protocol and registration form should be reviewed, as well as the arrangement of the room, the number of participants, the accommodations for child care, and so forth. During the pilot, the observer can time responses to questions in order to evaluate whether too many topics are included or whether any of the questions are too broad. Schedule enough time between the pilot and the succeeding groups to allow for any adjustments that might be necessary. If your experience in the pilot dictates major changes in the protocol that affect the meaning of questions, the pilot focus group discussion must be set aside and not included in the analysis of your findings. If only minor changes are made, and the basic meaning of your questions remains the same, then the discussion can be included for purposes of your analysis. (See Field Note.)

Field Note

After the pilot focus group session of our special needs project, we didn’t alter the meaning of the questions in our protocol, but we did clarify them and make them more appropriate to the ways in which our target population thought about child care. Our original protocol gave the false impression that we were referring to any out-of-home care as child care provided so that parents could work. This definition turned out to be much too limited for the parents in our sessions, and the terms we used seemed to cause a fair amount of confusion. They weren’t used to thinking about out-of-home care as “child care” in the traditional sense: many of their children were in part-day special programs to address their disabilities and that was the primary reason they were in any kind of out-of-home care. We wanted to capture those experiences and report how those programs addressed their children’s needs, as well as their own. Accordingly, in our revised protocol, we didn’t use the term “child care” but instead referred to “programs” or “care arrangements,” and defined those terms broadly, so that we could hear about special education or early intervention programs as well as the more traditional “child care” situations. In subsequent sessions, our questions were better understood by participants, and the discussion went much more smoothly.

Field Note

While a two-way mirror is not necessary to conduct focus groups, we did find that it was helpful for one of our pilot sessions because it allowed the entire team to observe and be involved in the debriefing. While we had a concern initially that the participants might be inhibited by the knowledge that unseen people were observing, we did not find that this was a problem. When they were told, they raised no concerns and it did not seem to distract them or affect their willingness to take part in the discussions.

Caution

Be aware that your pilot cannot serve to alert you to all of the problems or issues that may occur in your later sessions. At a different site, at a different time, with a different group, you could get very different reactions and results. It’s therefore best to consider the pilot as a chance to test your instruments and protocol for major oversights or mistakes that can then be corrected. Do not depend on it as a foolproof method for guaranteeing success in future sessions.

How do you deal with language barriers?

Depending on your location, it may be important to include those who only speak, or are more comfortable speaking, languages other than English. If you want to include non-English speaking parents, try not to place them in the same group with parents whose first language is English, expecting them to participate through the use of an interpreter. Try instead to attract enough parents with the same language to form a separate focus group. Even then you have the question of whether to use a facilitator who speaks their language or have an English speaking facilitator work with a simultaneous translator. In our experience, it is far better to use a facilitator who can conduct the entire session in the participants’ first language. The observer, note taker, and child care providers must also speak that language.

If you do end up having to use a simultaneous translator, make sure you emphasize with him or her that it is always necessary to translate word for word. For example, if a participant makes a statement that is then followed by another participant’s comment, the translator should never say only that the second speaker “is saying the same thing” or “agrees.” The second statement should also be translated word for word to capture the nuances and additional information she or he may have given in expressing agreement. If a translator is going to be used, it may be necessary to schedule extra time for the session.

	Field Note
	In one of our focus group projects, we attempted to use a simultaneous translator and a facilitator who could only understand a little Spanish. It didn’t work very well, and because of translation issues—both expected and unexpected—our Spanish language group lasted an extra hour.

What are your ethical obligations to participants?

Your organization has invited parents to come and talk about their experiences before strangers—with a tape recorder running. As a researcher, you bear a major responsibility for insuring that these parents, who have volunteered to let you see into their lives, are treated with respect and protected from breaches of confidentiality. The elements of these obligations are:

Informed consent. Provide parents with a copy of the consent form they sign to take with them after the session. Throughout the process of talking with parents—in the screening, at registration and at the beginning of the focus group session—issues of confidentiality should be stressed. (See Chapter Three for a discussion of the content of the consent form.)

Right to withdraw. The consent form must inform the participants of their right to withdraw from the group at any time, without penalty, should they become uncomfortable with the topic under discussion.

Securing confidential information. Take the following steps to make sure that confidential information about the participants remains secure:

All staff involved (researchers, note takers, community group staff who screen) must comply with the procedures you establish for securing identifying information.

Research staff should sign a form assuring that they will not divulge any identifying information without the written permission of participants. (See Appendix I for the form we used.)

Notes and transcriptions should be coded and kept separate from participant lists to lessen the risk of statements being tied to participants by name. (See discussion of coding earlier in this chapter and in Chapter Eight.)

Screening tools, participant lists, and tapes should be returned to the primary organization to be stored in locked cabinets with all other identifying materials. These materials should eventually be destroyed. Some researchers recommend waiting five years to do so in case you need to re-analyze the data or check the original forms.

Providing information to participants. Outreach materials on programs that relate to the issues being discussed in your focus groups should be provided at the sessions. While parents should not in any way be led to expect they are attending the sessions to receive direct services, the sponsoring organizations have an ethical obligation to at least inform parents about available help they might need. To avoid affecting the discussion in any way, these materials should not be handed out until after the session is over. (See Field Note.)

Field Note

In our project on child care and child health insurance, we found that in the case of a child care subsidy program that had run out of funding temporarily, parents placed on waiting lists for assistance still expressed great frustration at the lack of outreach information about eligibility, benefits, and enrollment. Because the funding situation prevented parents from enrolling, the agency staff who administered the program provided them with little information about the operation of the program or, for that matter, the waiting list! We learned from that experience that if no outreach materials exist, a simple fact sheet should be created to hand out after the focus group sessions. These materials should be provided in the primary language spoken by the focus group participants.

Expressing appreciation. Follow up courtesies are important. Send a letter to participants shortly after the session expressing your gratitude for their participation and reminding them that you will send them a copy of the final report if they desire one. You will also want to send a copy of the report to everyone who helped you—from the policy experts you interviewed to the community sources you consulted.

Send a thank you letter as well to the community groups that served as your partners. You might choose to send them a financial contribution or provide an item their organization needs as an additional gesture of appreciation.

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