Advantages of focus groups
The main advantages of focus groups are:
- they are useful to obtain detailed information about personal and group feelings, perceptions and opinions
- they can save time and money compared to individual interviews
- they can provide a broader range of information
- they offer the opportunity to seek clarification
- they provide useful material e.g quotes for public relations publication and presentations
Disadvantages of focus groups
The main disadvantages of focus groups are:
- there can be disagreements and irrelevant discussion which distract from the main focus
- they can be hard to control and manage
- they can to tricky to analyse
- they can be difficult to encourage a range of people to participate
- some participants may find a focus group situation intimidating or off-putting; participants may feel under pressure to agree with the dominant view
- as they are self-selecting, they may not be representative of non-users.
When putting together our focus group, our goal was to come up with a representative sample of our target audience. In order to do this, we began by pinpointing our target audience and creating a profile of a typical member.
Audience Profile
Age: 13-20
Gender: Female
Registrar General’s Social Scale: C2
Selby’s Psychographic Cluster: Drop-outs: who shun commitments of any kind
Description
A typical member of our target audience would be a teenage girl aged 13-20. The teenage girl would most likely to be going through her school years with the emotions of heartache and confusion in which she enjoys listening to calm relatable music in her spare time.
Focus Group
Using this audience profile as our basis, we compiled a group of six people who - to greater and lesser extents - share similarities with our 'typical' target audience member. We will continue to use the exact same focus group throughout our coursework and evaluations.
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