Preparation Assignment
Create a best practices set of guidelines for conducting focus groups
For Workshop 3, we will critically evaluate a focus group. Using the best pratices set of guidelines you create in this assignment, you will be asked to critically assess and respond to a video of a focus group – identifying strengths, weaknesses, and offering specific suggestions for modifications or changes.
To assit with your assessment/response, I am asking you to create a set of best practices guidelines for focus groups. This is a descriptive list of of: moderator behaviors, types of questions/wording/types of data collection approaches, focus group set up, selected participants. Essentially, this is a list of the charateristics, environmental qualities, conditions, moderator behaviors, type of sample populations, types of focus group activities/questions, pre-focus group preparation activities, post-focus group activities that a focus group researcher should strive to achieve to have a productive, informative, functional focus group that invites animated responses from participants, a sense of group connection, and thoughtful, candid responses.
You may organize the content of your guideliness in any order of information, but it may be helpful to think chronologically: starting with preparing for the focus group through concluding the group and wrapping up with immediate post-focus group activities; please use headings to organize your list, add a brief description why you are including that category, and then share your guidelines. Example below:
Example Guidelines (no mandatory expected number of pages – create what you consider to be a complete set of guidelines)
Focus Group Best Practices Guidelines
Pre-focus Group Research Preparation
(Very brief description why you included this category in your guidelines, no citations needed here)
Guideline for preparing for focus group research 1 (citation)
List additional guidelines under this category (citation)
Preparing the Room
(Very brief description why you included this category in your guidelines, no citations needed here)
Guideline for preparing the room 1 (citation) (citation) for multiple citations
Guideline for preparing the room 2 (citation)
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To prepare the guidelines and to receive full credit for the assignment, it is a requirement to draw from all of the assigned materials for 2/12 and the videos we watched in class (and cite them):
Textbook assigned pages
Taherdoost Ch. 1 excerpts (please skip coding and analysis for this assignment)
Pages 1-12 of Designing and Conducting Focus Group Interviews (DCFGI) analysis may be skipped for this assignment
BBQ focus group video
Airline focus group video Starting from 3:14 27:45 (end of the summary)
Please cite using the following format: (Textbook, page number), (Taherdoost, page number), (DCFGI, page number), (BBQ Focus Group: time), (Airline Focus Group: time)
Please cite at the end of each guideline. You may find multiple sources are relevant for one guideline entry, please cite relevant sources for that particular guideline. A variety of sources should be used throughout the guidelines. Each source has some unique content to contribute to your guidelines. You may find that you rely on some sources more than others and that is fine, but at least one (if not many more) guidelines should be created from each source.
AI should not be used for this assignment
Requirements: 1.5-2pages