Focus Group Interviews

Focus group interviews are a marketing research technique that has been successfully adapted to the needs of public relations practitioners. They do not yield the strictly quantitative data that can be gotten from a sur­vey. But they have the advantage of being open-ended and permitting members of target groups to speak in their own terms of understand­ing, provide their own emphasis, and respond to the views expressed by other members of the same group. The focus group interview re­quires trained moderators and equipment for recording the sessions. Audio and/or video tapes have to be put in transcript form, and then the transcripts must be summarized and analyzed. Sometimes focus group interviews are used as the basis for designing the questionnaires used in survey research, creating a valuable linkage between the two devices and enhancing the value of both. An example is the focus group research done by Larissa A. Grunig at the University of Maryland that sought to learn the attitudes of adults toward the housing of mentally ill people in apartment buildings within the community. "The focus groups were considered formative research, to be conducted before a telephone survey of a sample of all county residents and well ahead of the public relations plan to be developed and implemented by the consulting firm," the report said.