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The Importance of the Focus Group Method

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Focus groups are a form of group interview that make use of the communication between research participants in order to produce data. Group interviews are mostly used as a quick and easy way to collect data from several people at the same time and focus groups explicitly use group interaction as part of the method. This means that the researcher doesn’t just ask each person to respond to a question in turn, but people are encouraged to talk to one another: asking questions, exchanging stories and commenting on each other's experiences and points of view. The method is mainly useful for exploring people's knowledge and experiences and can be used to study not only what people think but how they think and why they think that way.
The reason why focus group method is used is that group processes can help people to explore and clarify their views in ways that would be less easily accessible in a one to one interview. Group discussion is mainly appropriate when the interviewer has a series of open ended questions and wishes to encourage research participants to explore the issues of importance to them, in their own terms, generating their own questions and focusing on their own priorities. Often when the group dynamics work well the participants work together with the researcher, taking the research in new and often unexpected directions.
Group work also helps researchers tap into the many different forms of communication that people use in day to day interaction. Having

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