Make sense of your data with focus group analysis software

A focus group is an interview involving multiple respondents to discuss ideas. Researchers may conduct a focus group to observe the interplay of ideas among various members.

A focus group consists of an interviewer/moderator and multiple research participants. A focus group discussion is similar to an interview in that the interviewer asks questions that research participants answer.

Important uses of this research includes:

• Market research
• Needs assessment
• Theoretical development

This method is similar to surveys and interviews in that the researcher seeks out opinions and perspectives. Each method has its merits, so it is essential to recognize that the most effective method of data collection depends on the context and objectives of your research.

Advantages over surveys

Surveys can collect information from large numbers of respondents, but they cannot ask follow-up questions for more detailed answers elaborating on survey responses. Moreover, respondents may make mistakes, leave blank answers, or give up in the middle of a survey. A group discussion usually involves fewer respondents but allows for a deeper exploration of ideas through dialogue.

Advantages over interviews

One-on-one interviews, like focus group discussions, can capture complex answers from a more dynamic interaction with respondents. However, interviews isolate research participants from each other. In an interview study, a researcher cannot capture the interplay between multiple respondents. A group interaction may be more helpful in studying topics like experiences at an amusement park or decisions about family planning, which typically involve multiple people working and acting in tandem with each other.

Effective questions encourage sustained interaction, where the interviewer is more of a facilitator of dialogue within the group. There are, of course, basic questions to pose to a group:

• What do you think about this product?
• How do you feel when you see this logo?
• Which supermarket do you visit the most?

That said, the group dynamics raise a number of other considerations and opportunities for research.

Fostering rapport

Unlike in an interview, where an individual respondent might be more open to sharing opinions with a single interviewer, discussion members might experience discomfort or anxiety in the presence of other respondents. As a result, you might benefit from beginning a focus group with some brief introductions to allow members to feel comfortable with each other.

Building narratives

Several prompts can help elicit narratives from a discussion:

• Tell me about the first time you used this product.
• What problem were you trying to solve when using this service?
• Let's talk about when you went to this amusement park with friends or family.

Eliciting these narratives can also raise reactions among other focus group members, such as agreement or surprise, that you can code for in ATLAS.ti to get a deeper understanding of a particular topic.

Solving problems

Questions that pose a problem to solve are an excellent way to encourage focus group members to discuss solutions together:

• What is the best path to the city center if you cannot use the train or the bus?
• How would you make this shopping center more accessible to more people?
• What are some ways to address the complaints made about this product?

This research method has an intuitive association with qualitative research. However, anyone can measure all data types quantitatively or qualitatively, depending on the research question you want to answer.

Qualitative analysis

One of the most common goals of analyzing discussions and interviews is to identify patterns in the perspectives of speakers to guide decision-making and theoretical development. Typically, researchers use textual data from transcripts of recordings of group discussions as qualitative data, which they can code in ATLAS.ti for essential or interesting themes. ATLAS.ti is user-friendly enough to allow analysis of group discussions through grounded theory or inductive analysis.

Quantitative analysis

That said, there are quantitative methods for analyzing data. Content analysis, for example, relies on determining the frequency of words or phrases in a text. ATLAS.ti has specific analytic tools that can contribute to a quantitative analysis:

• Text Search
• Word Cloud
• Word List
• Concepts
• Code Co-Occurrence
• Code-Document Table

Tools such as Word List and Code-Document Table can create tables and export them to Microsoft Excel for further statistical analysis.

You can also conduct a quantitative analysis of codes through tools such as Code Co-Occurrence to consider the relationship between themes and sentiments established by the frequency they appear in opinions.

In many ways, focus groups are similar to interviews, as any focus group transcript is simply a record of what the interviewer asks and what the respondents say. However, it will be essential to keep track of which respondent is speaking since members of a focus group are different.

During the coding process in ATLAS.ti, you can perform a text analysis by applying descriptive codes depending on which participant is speaking. Using the Query Tool or Code Co-Occurrence, you can then look for coded segments based on a combination of descriptive codes and codes that capture opinions or ideas (e.g., quotations with the codes "Speaker #1" and "Positive opinion").

You can use ATLAS.ti software to transcribe a focus group discussion while viewing video files or listening to audio files.

Other transcription services

Alternatively, various online services can generate automated transcripts of video and audio files in the form of VTT or SRT files. A list of numerous online platforms that provide automatic transcription of multimedia can be found in this article.

You can also view transcripts alongside multimedia files and enable synchronized scrolling of both entities.

ATLAS.ti is a focus group analysis software that has several tools that can create several visualizations to help researchers explain their analysis to their stakeholders and scholarly audiences:

• Code Co-Occurrence
• Code-Document Table
• Networks

Among other tools, the Code Co-Occurrence and Code-Document Table tools can generate tables, bar charts, and Sankey diagrams to summarize frequencies of main ideas and key concepts. These are especially helpful when presenting where themes differ depending on the focus group member or the topic explored in the discussion.