Analysis Basics: Principles of Focus Group Analysis

• It all begins from your research questions. These are the main screening tools you use in looking through transcripts, listening to tapes, or working from group summaries.

• Use either your research questions or key interview questions to organize the information.

• When possible, the people who conducted the focus groups (i.e. the facilitators) should conduct or assist with the analysis.

• Your main search, at first, is for themes and patterns. Read or listen repeatedly, over and over, and then some more. In this way, the information and its patterns will reveal themselves to you.

• First, sort the content you have in a way that makes good sense. Then describe the themes or clusters of information. Finally interpret what you have described - explain any underlying systems of meaning or values you observe.

• Consider valid only those interpretations you can support using focus group data. Here are some examples of appropriate ways to support a statement, claim, or assertion:

  > make a reference to a statement or discussion
  > describe a thread or pattern that ran through more than one discussion
  > quote participants

• Emphasize those points for which substantial agreement exists across groups, and across types of participants.

• Discover and describe the ways people differ in their opinions - the scope and variety of the full range of opinions.

• Identify any distinctive or unusual views not widely held that still seem worth considering, perhaps because they are a bit ahead of their time, or because they may reveal an important minority opinion that is held by enough people in the general population that it must be taken into account.

• When using direct quotes from participants, make it clear whether the quote presents a typical or an unusual view. See Step 5, page 149, for more details