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From: Patrick, Brian [mailto:[email protected]]  Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2014 1:36 PM To: Michael R. Weisser Subject: RE: Focus groups

I know quite a bit about focus groups. I ran a bunch of them for the State of Michigan commerce people a few years back. Most recently, I used focus groups to investigate (mis)perceptions of class held by students. I wrote about the results in a working paper called something like "Misperceptions of Middleclasshood: Socialization Propaganda and the Cargo Cut of the American Dream." It's on Amazon. I sent it out to some sociological journals but it enrages leftist reviewers. Not sure why. They get a bit incoherent in their reviews. Some of my most interesting findings were that people on food stamps regarded themselves as middle-class; that class was viewed moralistically and therefore to say that someone was lower class was to pronounce a moral judgement; and that something like 96 percent of the 300 or so subjects in 15 or 20 focus groups viewed themselves as middle-class, which is absurd according to most traditional definitions of class, especially when many were working in car washes or as wait-staff. A fun article.

But on to methodology. I dont know of any single source on focus groups that covers it all, although there must be one. So I will tell you what I know and do, and what I teach students in my group communication and professional business communication courses. I will probably use this material to develop an online "lecture" for my group Comm course this fall.

Generally, a Focus Group (FG) consists of about 8-15 or so people. Too few and there is no critical mass that stimulates and simulates natural public opinion processes, too many and you have a mob or a crowd in which people can remain silent and remote.

FGs are analogous in some ways to the cloud chambers or particle chambers used by physicists, wherein one sees, what happens, traces particles, the reactions that occur when some fissionable substance is bombarded with accelerated particles. In much the same way the facilitator of a focus group bombards the subjects with ideas and images, and then traces the results, the ideas, opinions, meanings, associations that come out of the group.

FGs are very useful in mapping reactions to messages, products, designs, proposals, interpretations, etc. and in designing services.

Generally they are composed of volunteers, Sometime people in malls, It has become necessary to incentivize people over the years, usually $25 maybe a meal too for a 60-90 minute FG. (Any longer is too long).

A few "rules."

1.Never ever trust a single focus group and commit to a course of action based on its results. There is an art to these things, and every once in a while, you will simply have to ask yourself, "Are these people crazy?" They may be. Also,a single nut, or an especially charismatic or dominant personality on a focus group can sometimes make the group take off a some tangent. Still, never run a message or ad without at least running it by a focus group. One is better than none. Preferably, run a series. Thus, you should see patterns emerging, clusters of beliefs or reactions, or recurrent principal themes.

2. A focus group is a sample of a larger population about which inferences are to be made. In order to thus safely generalize from your focus group results, the participants needs to be fairy representative of the ultimate target population about which you wish to make inferences. This does not necessarily mean a random sample. It means a representative sample. Often these are samples of convenience because it is getting well nigh impossible to get a truly unbiased random sample anymore, because non response or refusal is no randomly distributed. Bias results. Long gone are the days of 96 percent response rate. So, in practice, if you are selling cosmetics to young black women aged 14-22, in whatever income group, your focus group should reasonable represent this target population. Sometime researchers will try to match FG demographics with the region demographics by consulting US census data and matching them. So we see focus groups composed of so many males, so many females, so many blacks, etc.

A funny tale: Guy I knew at Michigan was trying to use focus groups to examine effects of political ads. He put up posters to recruit volunteers, promising 25 bucks and free pizza to show up for an evening non FG. Now at Michigan, those kids are well off (literally middle-class) for even back in the mid 1990s when I asked about family income in a survey on a political communication experiment, the average reported family income was something like $220K. This kids are not so easily incentivized. Who showed up? The winos and bums that lived under hedges around campus. They were a smelly lot and loudly demanded their money. His results were of course useless. Unless of course he were interested in the Wino Vote.

3. The facilitator must appear neutral and yet direct the group in non obtrusive way. Otherwise they respond too much too his personality and not to the substance. I tend to work with a co-facilitator, usually a woman, because I find that women are perceptive in ways that I am not. They note things, reactions, sub conversations, things that went over my head. Occasionally the facilitator will have to pull the group back when discussion wanders too far off the topic. He also uses nondirective response affirmation, just like psychoanalytic technique, such as "I see" or "Um" or the ubiquitous "How do you feel about that?" or "Let's return to the original question." Or you can draw out something said by a member in the group (if it goes where you are interested in going.)

4 Go from General to Specific in presenting your questions and use open ended questions in the beginning rather than closed ended questions . Don't bias your own questions, they will pick up on this and feed you social desirability responses. Example, instead of "What do you think of assault weapons." Show them a photo and ask, "How do you feel about this?" or "What do you think of when you see this picture?" WHen you get more general responses, then home toward specifics, " What are assault weapon?," and maybe, later more detailed (closed ended questions). "Should assault weapons be legal? When I did my class misperceptions focus groups I began with something like "You guys are all familiar with the concept of social economic class, lower, middle and upper class, what class do you belong to? " And then I would ask ,more or less, "How do lower class people differ from middle class. And also how the upper class people differ from the middle class?" Also, "How did you learn what class you belonged too?" I had trouble getting them to stop. Then getting very specific I asked, "What would you do if tomorrow morning you woke up and found yourself being in the lower class?" They went crazy. Seldom do I see such enthusiasm in discussions. Toward the end, I would get in their faces a bit, saying very specific things like. "Aren't you guys really lower class? After all, most of you work at low paying jobs, and often have more than one job? After all if you were middle class, wouldn't you be at Harvard or some place like that?" They became indignant, but talked much. Some came to visit me later and reported talks they had with their parents and elders about class.

5. As mentioned about 60-90 minutes is max time frame. More and you loose them.

6. Informed consent is important. Prepare a waiver/briefing sheet for them to sign, individually, describing the general topic of the FG and assuring them of anonymity, usually this is done by saying that their data will be used in aggregate, or they may be quoted, but in no way will it ever be possible to identify them individually. Thank them. Promise to share final results with them if they should later inquire.

7. Records, note taking, etc. must be non obtrusive. Some people, with permission of participants, record focus groups, even sometimes having nonverbal COMM people look over the tapes for non verbals responses. I don't because I find that recording somehow changes the responses. Most people freeze or start acting "funny" when a camer is shoved in their face. Some perform. What I do is to take a few notes, e.g, numbers, details like names or locations, during the FG, but immediately after sit down with my facilitator and the general question sheet that I had prepared in advance, and go through again, noting copiously reactions and comments. If you do it later and it is lost. In this way after several focus groups, you will assemble a great deal of data.

8. Quantify and report later. You may code or group FG data into clusters or themes, and get a pretty good idea of how the target population may feel about the subject, or what they know, or don't know. This should go into a final repot. Don't forget that "other" is a valid category. Generalization can be difficult because you may be buried in data. Surveys on the other hand are more easily quantifiable.

9. FGs yield "Thick data." This is both boon and curse. Boon because thick description help you understand what people know or don't know, what they associate, their cognitive map, how they arrive where they are, so to speak. A curse, because there can be so much data that you don't know how to categorize it or generalize from it. FGs provide great quotes and paraphrases for articles .

10. FGs are especially useful for designing and testing mass surveys. It is common to test and develop survey measure with FGs . Sometime you will find that even though you and your inner circle understand what you are talking about, the masses may have no idea. An example . Sometime in classes I will talk about "democratic participation" or some similar topic, and a fair portion of the class will say, "But what about the Republicans?" In survey research these sort of misunderstandings are called "cognitive problems." FAce to face, they are evident, but in a survey, the result is bad measurement validity. Common syh problem: I have found that most people will agree that "semiautomatic weapons should be outlawed" but less than 25 percent of seniors, for example, less that chance, can correctly select the definition of "semiautomatic."

11. Thoughtfully conducted FGs may be a better source of public opinion data than today's so called random surveys. It is very difficult these days to get a good random sample because of refusals, which are more general. BAck in the 1950s and 60s response rates were above 90 percent and most people had home telephones and would cooperate. No longer. Sensibly derived FG provide depth and provided the sample is reasonably representative may provide a better map by which to navigate. Note that the White House and the political parties all conduct regular focus groups. They know. They even pre-test state of the union scripts and so forth with FGs. In a sense property of FGs addresses the old artificiality v naturalness problem in research design. FG are more natural than surveys and not as artificial as controlled experiments, which some say "cook the data." FG provide natural data in that they are formed or derived in a naturalistic group setting that more resembles how people really live, in groups, as social animals, acting and reacting to social stimuli (love that word!).

12 A last point. FGs will sometimes tell you things beyond your limited imaginings. FGs can be untrammeled . They may note and mention things that organizations, always prone to groupthink, cannot see or discuss. Your bigshot candidate may be laughed at when he gestures expansively. He may squeak out a message and the FG will say so. An example. I tried some mock ads on FGs designed to recruit workers for certain construction industries. The message had been derived from and tested already on other FGs: "Did you earn $60K last year?" An ad agency did mockups featuring young men and women in plaid shirts and construction like outfits. The FGs said, in variants, "Those guys look gay." And maybe they did, as I have no idea how the agency recruited its models. This maybe would have been fine if we were advertising Abercrombie and Fitch fashions in new York, but not for construction workers in Mid-Michigan It was an unintended effect. And they told us about it clearly, when it had never occurred to any is us.

13. FGs are a scientifically informed art. I may know more about FGs, but the foregoing is all I can think of at the moment. If I knew one good source, I would refer you. I don't. Ask questions, please on the things I may have overlooked.

Last note, not on FGs.

My Krieghoff double rifle was delivered last week after ordering it more than a year ago. Nice. 9.3 X 74R caliber. The factory target was done with 232 grain bullets, but I found that it handles that 286 grains better, tighter groups, which is good, because that weight is what I would prefer to use (I hunt elk in SW Montana most years). I you see I have no sense of moderation. And I likes me a nice rifle.

I now have some copies of Ten Commandments of Propaganda, and I will send you one next week or so when I am down at the University.

BAP

From: Michael R. Weisser [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2014 8:57 AM To: Patrick, Brian Subject: Focus groups

Brian: You mention using focus groups in your NRA book (I think.) I have some friends who are thinking of doing some research on gun attitudes (or, I should say, on attitudes about guns) and want to form some focus groups, perhaps in different cities although right now they are looking at Dallas.

Any suggestions about how to build such groups? How did you do it?

Thanks,