Focus Group Café An improvement on traditional focus groups?

There are several ways to obtain people’s opinions and feedback. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups are three of the most common. The Focus Group Café is another possibility.

Surveys

The first method is the ubiquitous questionnaire or survey form. They are convenient and inexpensive to administer.

Most people hate completing such forms and do it quickly without much thought or reflection.

The information gathered is restricted by the questions, and even when there are boxes for further comments, they are rarely completed.

By and large, surveys are a poor way to solicit quality feedback

Interviews

The second method is one-to-one, face-to-face interviews. These can work better than surveys but can be time-consuming.

They can also be not much better than surveys if the interviewer asks questions from a form and completes it on behalf of the interviewee.

The interviewer cannot help but influence the answers however hard they try – they are not neutral.

Surveys and Interviews

These two methods are limited because often, when you ask someone to describe the problems they have encountered, what opportunities they see in a situation, or what they would like to see in a product, they come up with a few ideas but then quickly dry up.

They lack the mental stimulation to think more broadly or profoundly or recall incidents from the past.

Focus Groups

A third method is some form of focus group.

How focus groups are designed and run varies tremendously, depending on their purpose, the types of questions, and the people involved.

Focus groups also have problems in that they are often overly formal, too structured, and too focused, and participants play the game and give responses the organizers wish to hear.

Because of the “focus,” they are good at surfacing the obvious but not so good at surfacing more profound knowledge or making new connections.

Focus Group Cafés

Listening to others’ verbalized experiences stimulates memories, ideas, and experiences in participants.

This is also known as the group effect where group members engage in “a kind of ‘chaining’ or ‘cascading’ effect; talk links to, or tumbles out of, the topics and expressions preceding it”

Credit: Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor

An alternative to the above three approaches is needed — one that is more informal, divergent, and relaxed.

You need to get people talking in a relaxed, informal manner to surface things just beneath their level of consciousness.

Put them in small groups of 3 or 4 people; set the context and ask a question, and things work out differently to filling in a form, a face-to-face interview, or a brainstorming session.

People start to talk and reflect, and as they do – things begin to emerge; one person points out a problem, and another picks up on it and expands or elaborates on it.

People trigger each other’s memories and thought processes. Issues that were not seen as issues suddenly come to life.

This is where the Knowledge Café comes into play.

Unlike the focus group, it is unfocused. It is set up quite deliberately to let people go off-topic, surface new thoughts and ideas, and make new connections.

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