Introducing Focus Groups

The focus group (a less formal forum) included a medical doctor, two residents, two community members, two family members of the residents, nurses, director of nursing, the administrator, a member of the board of the directors, an IT specialist and human resource personnel. A focus group is a specialized group interview in which group members are not told exactly what the interviewer wants to

Focus groups provide a rich and detail source of information. The purpose is to discover how they feel about a product, concept, idea or organisation. The views of one person may become the stimulus for another’s ideas or may start a useful discussion. People tend to be encouraged to talk when they realise that others have similar experiences and attitudes.

Focus groups can be an excellent way to collect data and be able to identify if the interventions have an effect on the clients (Stringer, 2007). I’m interested

Flexible and inexpensive, focus groups consist of six to ten participants (Hartman, 2004, p. 408). Additionally, a moderator guides the discussion among its panel members that allows researchers to observe real-time verbal responses and nonverbal cues (Hartman, 2004, p. 402; Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 160). Focus groups moderators also have the ability to introduce new ideas to gain a greater understanding of concerns from respondents (Hartman, 2004, p. 402). However, a concern with focus group is the lack of anonymity due to the face-to-face participation.

This article represents a focus group type of qualitative research. According to Qualitative Research Consultants Association (2015), in focus group qualitative research, a group of individuals who share a need, life circumstance, or habit relevant to the research issue(s) at hand are led in a discussion by a modulator. The focus group discussions often include between two to ten respondents, and are often held face to face. They can also be conducted remotely through videoconferencing, teleconferencing, or

In order to gather a lot of data, a focus group is recommended. According to Howitt D. (2013), an optimal focus group consists of six to ten participants (Howitt, 2013; Morgan, 1997). The fact that an experienced interviewer conducted the interview led to good control and desired data(Morgan, 1996). Furthermore, a thematic analysis provided a systematic overview of the results.

Sharing circle and focus group discussions are similar in that they are commonly used in qualitative research to explore and construct knowledge about a phenomenon with research participants in small groups (Redman-MacLaren, Mills, and Tommbe 2014). Also, both methods can be used to explore experiences surrounding a particular topic within a group of various cultures (Tobias and Richmond 2016). The choice between focus group and sharing circles largely depends on the epistemological position of the researcher, the context, and the study population (Redman-MacLaren, Mills, and Tommbe 2014).

The data was gathered by using a focus group methodology combined one to one interviews for the student with Autism. The purpose of using two methods of data collection is based on the action research study design, which takes a series of quick looks at different times in a variety of ways (Johnson, 2012). By using focused groups to collect data, insight is gained on the different perspective of multiple stakeholders on to how to build a comprehensive transition plan that will carry students with ASD starting secondary school into adulthood (Kucharczyk et al., 2015). In addition focus groups use people with similar characteristic who engage in a deliberate discussion about a particular topic . Furthermore the focus group methodology used will help to identify key issues and themes in areas that has limited data gathered (Fontana & Frey, 1994).

I engage with the evidence of a focus group I conducted to discover how an audience

Focus groups are a popular method used to capture views and opinions for qualitative research.

Jemma, the researcher and focus group moderator, has structured the discussion in the following way: to start with, Jemma provides a frame of reference for the focus group referring to the aim of her research, and summarizes the pre-formulated research questions that serve as openings to obtain such feedback (Nel, Romm, & Tlale, 2015). Focus groups are seen as providing a unique data source, and tend to emphasise their value in exploring participants’ knowledge and experiences and in helping to understand not only what people think, but also why they think the way they do (Greenwood, Ellmers, & Holley, 2014).

Eight to fifteenth participants were in attendance at each focus group. At the start of each focus group participants began by completing a general survey about their socio-demographic, finances, health and wellbeing. A researcher facilitated a series of questions and two UCLA team members took notes and recorded each group. The questions (appendix a) covered topics from overall health, nutrition, budget, savings, debt, and financial security. All the information then was transcribed and analyzed by the UCLA team members. The 3 Spanish focus group was transcribed and interpreted by an outside vendor. While the English focus an UCLA team member transcribed group.

Although Berg and Lune (2012) cite Barbour (2008) who states that focus groups are small groups of unrelated individuals, I personally tend to side with Schein who states, "If you want to access your organization's culture, bring together a group of employees who represent the parts of the organization that may be most involved with solving the business problem...” (2009, p. 82). By its very term, a focus group focuses on something. I believe that in ethnographic studies, the "something” is the culture or microculture which relates the participants to each other. Focus groups allow the researcher to obtain large amounts of data in a short amount of time. With a good moderator of the focus group, the researcher should be able to discover

The planned data collection method is a focus group, which emerged in the 1940s by Merton and Fiske (Cohen & Crabtree, 2006). This study will use focus group as a primary data collection (Millward, 2012). Cohen and Crabtree (2006) defined focus groups as “data collection method, [where] data are collected through a semi-structured group interview process.” According to Greenbaum (1993), the focus group has been used since the late1960s. A focus group is “a qualitative research (…) you do not obtain results with percentages, statistical

Focus groups are a prominent method of enquiry, regularly used within the field of social science and in particular, qualitative research. The focus group practice involves a number of participants having an open discussion on a specific topic, set by a researcher. The researcher acts as a moderator to aid discussion by using probes to collect desirable data. This process is recorded and transcripts are used to interpret and analyse given information.