Focus Group Response

Doing a focus group was very insightful but it did have challenges. We had eight people come to our focus group which seemed like it was a great thing. However, this caused many participants to not participate. We had two participants who would talk a lot which would cause the others and the more shy participants to not speak because they either felt uncomfortable or they would say that their thoughts and feelings were already expressed by the other participants. When this was happening, we didn’t have a real method of hearing people’s thoughts, we just let people talk if they wanted to. After the second question of seeing this pattern, we decided to go around the table for the rest of the questions, so that we knew that every person’s feelings and thoughts were heard during the focus group. It would have been more beneficial if we had done this from the beginning, but now we know for the next time we have to do a focus group.