Effective focus groups

Recently I’ve been working with Sheffield University on their Athena Swan submission. I ran focus groups for them, to generate qualitative data to support the quantitative data they already had. I just wanted to try to capture what I learnt doing this, in case it might be helpful for anyone else running focus groups within a large organisation.

First of all, it is important to be clear that any information generated will be anonymised. This might seem obvious, but it is vital so it is worth stating. This is important as it enables people to say what they genuinely think, rather than censoring themselves because of the fear of possible consequences. Obviously, there are factors which work against this, such as the fact that some group members may be intimidated by other, more senior, staff members, and still be afraid to contribute.

There are, however, ways around this. The method I used was to ask every member to create a written record of their impression of the group, including what they had learnt from it, and what they felt was particularly important. This ensured that all members of the group generated information which could be fed back into the final results.  This also allowed the more quiet or shy group members to make their own contributions without feeling awkward, and created a space for people to put forward ideas which might contradict the ‘official line’ established by senior figures within the group.

I also used a graphic, visual system to generate another data stream. This was a picture on which group members were asked to identify where they fit in the department, using a single sentence to explain their decision. This provided very different information. It obtained a more emotional, less rationalised, response which provided an interesting contrast with the information generated through other methods.

By combining information from all these sources, I was able to gather large volumes of information from every session, using the minimum amount of both time and money.

It was a real pleasure to work with the university on such an important project. It was refreshing to see how committed they were to improving the opportunities for women in science.