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Strategy Skills > Building an Evidence Base

Collecting data - Interviews & focus groups

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The aim of these tools is to get a better understanding of the preferences, needs, expectations and experience of citizens, customers or business people, and how different policy options might impact upon these groups. Both interviews and focus groups are an excellent way of getting a "real world" view on a particular issue.

Interviews

During the "Set up" phase of the project, interviews with key policy makers in government and selected stakeholders can provide important insights; for example, into the nature of the problem, work underway and the further work required.

During the analytical phase of the project, more comprehensive in-depth interviews with a broader group of stakeholders including academics and researchers will be required. These interviews will focus not only on the nature of the problem but causes, prospects for change and the feasibility of possible solutions. The aim of the interview is to guide the discussion enough to focus on a topic of interest whilst giving the respondents sufficient scope to steer the conversation to bring in all sorts of tangential matters.

It will be helpful to develop a list of the key questions to cover at such interviews, particularly if they are being conducted by different members of the project team. It will also be important to write detailed interview notes to be kept on the shared drive, to enable all team members to benefit from the discussion.

The project team may decide to commission papers or research from selected interviewees following these interviews.

Focus Groups

Focus groups entail structured interviews with a small number of consumers to explore a particular issue or policy, or to seek views on areas of concern. Focus groups are generally considered to be a 'qualitative' method - exploring a small number of people's views and feelings in-depth, as opposed to large scale surveys that ask large numbers of people identical questions and that are more suitable to quantitative analysis.

Generally, projects will want to use a number of groups, with different consumer segments, to test how different groups feel or will react.

The process typically involves:

• Specifying what is required and selecting a specialist facilitator
• Deciding on the target groups and how these should be segmented (e.g. by gender, socio-economic group, work - e.g. single mothers, young people, small businesses)
• Producing supporting material for focus groups that can help clarify policy options and developments and help people easily visualise the proposals
• Following the focus groups, a follow-up discussion with the researchers is useful, and the final report then needs to bring out the most salient issues.

Alternatives to focus groups include:

• market research surveys e.g. British Social Attitudes Surveys
• modelling at the individual consumer level e.g. representative journeys for FSU transport review
• 'ghost shoppers' e.g. researchers or actors directly experiencing services - used by the Consumer Association
• role playing
• event diaries e.g. National Travel Survey based upon travel diaries.

It is important to be very clear about the purposes of the exercise - what evidence the focus groups are looking to collect, how the event can be tailored to the participants while maintaining analytical rigour and how to prime the groups. Consideration should also be given to which social groups need to be consulted, how broad the consultation should be and how the groups will be managed and facilitated.

A useful first step is to design some scenarios for the groups to consider - this is a useful exercise to organise the team's own thoughts, and will help to design the consultation, and provide a clear view of what the groups should focus on. Scenarios also offer the opportunity to be creative - they can set out existing practices or problems, but they can also be used to pose some hypothetical questions.

It is also useful to consider using external expertise to organise, host and facilitate the groups - MORI and others have good expertise in this area. If an external consultant is involved, consideration should be given to how the results should be presented back - either as a factual report, a presentation, a report with suggested solutions to problems posed etc. It can be better to simply get a factual read-out as this leaves more scope for the team to interpret the findings for themselves and design creative solutions.

Strengths

• Interviews give an insight into problem from a range of perspectives.
• Stakeholders can act as sounding boards and provide a reality check.
• Can generate new ideas and hypotheses, and can challenge prior assumptions of policy-makers about public attitudes.
• Provides insights for policy making by indicating some of the drawbacks of existing arrangements or potential new policies.
• Gives a more considered view than conventional surveys, in a more natural 'conversation' with other members of the public.
• Understanding motivation.
• Relatively cheap.

Weaknesses

• Time-consuming.
• Stakeholders may try to apply pressure through lobbying.
• Views from selected frontline organisations will be based on individuals' experiences and may not always be representative. Therefore conclusions need to be assessed in the light of other evidence.
• Be aware of limitations: focus group participants won't have a policy background (obviously) and won't be able to discuss detailed policy issues. Focus groups may not throw up many new ideas or produce very rational discussion (though useful to be aware of the apparent contradictions in consumers' views) and results may not be of too much help to the project.
• As the focus groups tend to involve small numbers they may not be representative of the wider population, or even of the narrower population from which they are drawn. A single focus group per consumer segment/policy issue means that any differences between groups may not be robust and caution should be taken over wider inferences.

References

The Good Research Guide, Martyn Denscombe

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