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From their lives
A Manual on How to Conduct
Focus Groups of Low-income Parents
Helen Ward, Project Director
Julie Atkins, Research Assistant
A publication of the Institute for Child and Family Policy
of the
Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine,
and funded by the Ford Foundation, September, 2002.
© copyright 2002
Institute for Child and Family Policy
Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service
University of Southeern Maine
ISBN 0-9708327-2-9
September 2002
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our thanks to the Ford Foundation for their funding
of this manual and to Nancy Sconyers who supplied the inspiration and
support for this work.
We would also like to thank the Ford Foundation for their support of
the focus groups we did in Virginia, and the Child Care Bureau of the
Administration on Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, for their support of the focus groups we conducted in
Connecticut and Maine.
Our appreciation goes to Ami Nagle, Erin Oldham, Amy Rossi and Nancy
Sconyers for reviewing drafts of the manual and providing us with their
comments.
We are grateful to the many collaborators we had for our focus group
projects, at both the state and community level. Their wisdom and advice
were invaluable to us as we carried out the focus groups and kept track
of “lessons learned” for inclusion in this manual.
A particular thanks to Suzanne Clark Johnson, Executive Director of the
Action Alliance for Virginia’s Children and Youth, the statewide
child advocacy organization with whom we collaborated on our initial focus
group project in that state, and to Linda Rich, our focus group facilitator
for the focus groups we held in all three states. In the various “debriefings”
we held, their insights contributed significantly to the development of
this “how to” guide.
Most of all, we wish to express our gratitude to the parents who participated
in our focus groups. So much of what we learned was a result of their
willingness to allow us into their lives.
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