Clarify the aims of the research and draft research questions.

In the planning and decision-making stage, the work team clarifies the aims of the research and sets some perimeters. As a group, you will make decisions in response to the following questions: What are the intended outcomes of the research? What questions does the research need to answer?

In Jessamine County, educators and school board members needed to know how students viewed their school climate and how they responded to a variety of ideas about increasing student safety. Here's one of the research questions they developed: "How safe do Jessamine County School students feel at school?

In Fayette County, educators and administrators at the two technical high schools wanted to find out what caused or prevented students from attending their programs. Educators and students at two other high schools needed to know how different members of the school community could work together to close the achievement gap between high-performing and low-performing students.

Work toward the answers to these questions by determining the most important thing you need to know that you do not know now. One possibility is to identify puzzles and mysteries - what mystifies you about how students think, make decisions, or act, where they get information, or what kind of information they value and use? For example, what do you need to know about how students respond to various teaching styles? Or, what do you need to know about the ideal relationship between teachers and students?

The main work at this point involves drafting the research questions that will guide your inquiry. These are the questions for which you want to obtain answers. Research questions are the driving force behind the research we conduct. Good research questions are not put in front of participants, who would find them hard to answer. (The questions you ask participants are the interview questions, and they come later.) Research questions are those that can be answered only after listening carefully to a significant number of people who have the answers. Research questions are answered through analysis, as a result of putting together (aggregating) information gained from several groups and, usually, several questions.

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Research Questions		Interview Questions
State the central focus or theme of the inquiry		Invite participants to speak about topics that will lead to answering the research questions
Are not asked in focus groups		Are asked in focus groups
Maximum of four questions; fewer is better		Maximum of six big question categories; dozens of follow-up questions
Answered by aggregating information from several groups		Answered directly by participants

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Aim for one to three research questions. Focus groups are usually too brief to address more.

Here are some examples of research questions for various focus group topics:

How do students feel about the work they are asked to do?

What qualities do middle school students most value in their principals?

How are Kentucky high school students responding to changes in the state's academic assessment process?

To what extent do students think/feel there are cultural barriers among students and between students and adults at our middle school? How do these barriers affect students socially or academically?

What factors affect student enrollment in technology programs?

As an example, here is the complete set of research questions the 1998 Jessamine County work team developed for use on the topic of school climate and school safety:

What are students' perceptions about school?

Do students think of themselves as valued members of the school community?

How safe do Jessamine County School students feel at school?

How would the presence of uniformed safety officers affect students' views of their school?

Next: Make decisions about focus group structure.