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| Students Speak Toolkit > II. The Focus Group Blueprint > A. Design > 9. Draft and revise interview questions. |
Interview questions are the questions that facilitators ask participants directly in each focus group session. Decisions about key interview questions include how many to ask, how to arrange the questions, what style of inquiry is appropriate, and how much time to spend on each question.
If you are conducting an effort in an entire district...
Depending on the decisions your work team has already made about focus group structure, you may need to develop a set of questions for each school level or adapt the questions as appropriate. See the different question sets from the 1998 Jessamine County effort for an example.
Usually it is best to have no more than six key interview questions. Even fewer may be better. These key questions are, in a sense, categories of questions that are intended to help answer the research questions. For each interview question, facilitators will typically use a number of both pre-planned and spontaneous follow-up questions. The pre-planned follow-ups are called "probes."
We provide four examples of sets of interview questions:
Approaches differ. It often works to begin with questions for which each person in the group is sure to have an answer. This contributes to a climate of safety, encourages participation, and reduces participants' anxieties. (The anxieties matter because they can prevent full expression of opinions, and that weakens the research.)
Try to make even the first question relate to the topic in a general way.
Once people begin to be comfortable with responding to the topic, move to
general questions that are open-ended, and begin to give the group some experience
with the style of work you will use for the rest of the session.
Save the most important and "charged" questions for last, when
comfort and relaxation are likely to be greatest. Often there is a point,
about 45 minutes into the session, where participants appear to have stopped
monitoring their comments - they seem to have made a judgment that it will
be safe for them to express their real thoughts.
Save questions that require people to respond in some novel fashion for the
latter part of the session. A request for something like drawing a picture
works best after the group has become comfortable and is responding quite
freely.
See more information on how to put the questions in good order, including a sample set of somewhat silly interview questions.
The best interview questions come from the work of a small group. A subcommittee or other group the work team creates should get together, look closely at the research questions, and then consider what questions facilitators can ask that will help answer the research questions. The best interview questions seem to come from a somewhat playful group that drafts questions, tests them on members, edits them, tries them out again, and repeats the process until the questions seem workable and useful in determining the answers to the research question(s).
Good interview questions have these attributes:
Good interview questions use certain parts of our questioning language. Here are some preferred openings for good focus group interview questions:
Be cautious about using other parts of the usual questioning vocabulary in focus groups. Avoid those questions that could put people on the defensive or seem intrusive. Be particularly cautious about using these words in focus group interview questions:
Avoid some kinds of questions completely. Here are some proven no-nos:
Remember that one of the main benefits of focus groups is the opportunity to hear participants describe their views and opinions in their own words. For this reason, minimize your use of questions that require a simple show of hands, for example, questions like "How many of you agree that...?" While these kinds of questions may be useful in the beginning as a way to warm participants up and increase their comfort level, they are less constructive once the group is underway.
Do Your Questions Say What You Mean?
One of the interview questions in the 1998 Jessamine County focus groups asked students to rank a series of statements from their most important concern about school to their least important concern about school. The word "concern" proved to be troublesome; students in the various focus groups interpreted it at least four different ways:The findings from this question were therefore unreliable because of the different ways in which the question was presented and interpreted and the subsequent great variation in participant responses.
- some students interpreted the list of "concerns" as things they are worried about
- some students interpreted "concerns" as important conditions at school
- some students interpreted "concerns" as what should be important at school
- some students interpreted "concerns" as what they think about in relation to school
Make sure the language of your questions appropriately reflects that of the intended focus group population, and that you have avoided words whose meaning may be ambiguous or interpreted in multiple ways.
Really good questions have great power. They can seem almost magical in their ability to get students talking about school. But oral questions are not the only way to stimulate conversation about your research questions. Particularly with younger students, creative educators will find many ways to engage different types of learners in interesting conversations sparked by objects, quotations, video clips, photographs, and more. See ideas about alternatives to straight verbal or oral questions.
As "living examples," view these four sets of interview questions that have been used in previous student focus group work:
Your work team should conduct a pilot group or trial run to test the workability of your interview questions. Ideally, plan to run at least two pilots. The first will show you the most glaring problems with your questions. You will see whether students find the questions inscrutable, or whether they respond to some meaning in the question that was hidden from you (for example, the different interpretations of the word "concerns").
After you revise the questions, try them out with a second test group. This will give you the opportunity to see if your adjustments worked as you intended. Just remember that one pilot group is 1,000 times better than none at all.
Example of the Importance of Pilot Groups
The work team at one Fayette County middle school ran two pilot groups, one with 7th grade girls and one with 8th grade boys, to test questions on the topic of cultural and social barriers. The first question asked participants to write the names of groups/cliques that exist at the school on index cards. When participants asked for clarification, the student facilitators in each group (one pair of male students and one pair of female students) provided significantly different examples that then set the tone for the rest of their groups' conversations. The male facilitators named such groups as blacks, whites, and Hispanics, while the female facilitators named such groups as cheerleaders and basketball players. As a result, the participants' responses to the remainder of the questions varied widely between the two groups.
These pilot groups revealed the necessity for all of the student facilitators to get together and determine how to best present the first question and provide all participants with the same examples, without skewing their responses in one direction or another. After the pilots, the facilitators met and figured out some common language to use if they were asked to explain the meaning of certain questions.
Pilot groups made up of people who resemble your real participants are ideal.
For example, work team members from a Fayette County high school conducted
a pilot group with their own 11th grade male students before running groups
with 11th graders in other high schools. You can conduct a random sample to
recruit participants for the pilot groups. Another option would be to bring
together a group of about eight willing students, such as members of an extracurricular
club or students from a particular classroom. Once students participate in
a pilot group, however, they should be excluded from participating in the
"real" focus groups.
You should arrange the pilot group(s) in the same way as your actual focus
groups: find an available room; send home permission forms and letters to
parents; offer refreshments; set up recording equipment; and use trained facilitators.
Refer to the checklist for recruiters and the checklist for site managers for a complete list of all the steps involved in making the groups happen.
IMPORTANT: Once you begin running the "real" focus groups, you shouldn't make any changes to the questions. All groups must answer the exact same questions in order for your results to be credible and so that you can truly compare groups to each other.
If you absolutely do not have time to conduct a pilot group, make sure that you receive a lot of input from the student representatives on the work team. They will be able to provide significant assistance with refining the language of the questions to reflect that of students. They will also help determine the suitability of certain questions and whether questions are "answerable" or not.
Next: Make decisions about focus group facilitation.
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