Make sense of your data with focus group analysis software

Easily conduct qualitative analysis on your interviews and group discussions and get a new perspective with help from the industry-leading platform for qualitative and mixed methods research.

Get deeper insights with better focus group data analysis

Perform qualitative data analysis on all sorts of data, from simple text transcripts to video recordings for a more detailed picture. Besides smart auto coding and real-time team collaboration, ATLAS.ti provides you with a wide range of intuitive research tools for faster results of your focus group analysis.

Figure out the "why" behind your participant's motivations

Understand the behaviors and emotions that are driving your focus group participants. Among all qualitative analysis software packages, ATLAS.ti is perfectly suited for transforming your raw data and turning it into qualitative insights you can learn from. Easily determine user intent in the same spot you're deciphering your overall focus group data.

Visualize your research findings like never before

We make it simple to present your analysis results with meaningful charts, networks, and diagrams. Instead of figuring out how to communicate the insights you just unlocked, we enable you to leverage easy-to-use visualizations that support your goals.

ATLAS.ti boasts many benefits including intuitive design. But its customer service really is what wins them the gold star. Especially for those who are not too technologically savvy, ATLAS.ti is the software that will have the patience to deal with you!
Cristina Parajon
Sociology student, Harvard University
ATLAS.ti is the easiest and most comfortable software to use for coding qualitative data.
Svetlana Poleschuk
PhD, Education Researcher, UNICEF
Qualitative data offers great value in really understanding the context for any research endeavour, and ATLAS.ti is the go-to software to pull analyses together in a systematic way.
Prof. Michelle J. Hindin
Founder and Director - Evidence 4 Global Impact, LLC
I want to say thank you for helping me today. With your help I am now able to use ATLAS.ti easier to finish my dissertation. Again, I want to say thank you. The ATLAS.ti support is by far the best support I have ever received from a software company
Nicholas Belongie, PhD
Nicholas Belongie, PhD - University at Buffalo, USA
The ATLAS.ti support desk helped me a great deal with several challenges in ATLAS.ti. On the way I learned how to solve issues in future! I can recommend working with ATLAS.ti and diving into its possibilities because you'll be surprised by what this fantastic analysis software can have you discover from your data!
Marieke De Wijse-Van Heeswijk
PhD researcher - Radboud University
I have been an ATLAS.ti user for over 20 years, and during that time the software has always been my first choice for qualitative research. ATLAS.ti continues to innovate and improve each year adding new features and benefits for its user community. I highly recommend it for your qualitative research.
Ken Riopelle
Research Professor, Wayne State University
ATLAS.ti has been a great tool for my PhD research which I have been using to analyze qualitative interviews from Ghana and Nigeria. It was the perfect solution, and we were happy to learn that we could collaborate with researchers in any country or institution without obtaining a special license.
Dr. Kwabena Kusi-Mensah
FWACP (Psych), MSc.CAMH (Ib.), PhD Candidate in Psychiatry, University of Cambridge
The Canadian Foundation for Animal-Assisted Support Services {CFAS} is a grateful recipient of the ATLAS.ti software. I have gradually learned more about using the software to share our charity's narrative, presentation content, and research project outcomes. ATLAS.ti staff have been highly supportive and patient with me as I continue to embark on this incredible journey of discovery.
Joanne Moss
CEO/Founder - The Canadian Foundation for Animal-Assisted Support Services {CFAS}
The ATLAS.ti organization has a strong support team available to researchers and the trainers are excellent. Their webinar presenters are world-class experts who show how ATLAS.ti can be used to analyze data from a wide variety of disciplines.
Dr. Karin Olson
PhD, RN, FAAN, Adjunct Professor, School of Nursing - The University of British Columbia
We are an early-stage startup building the world's first virtual clinic specialized in Team-Based Care. I used ATLAS.ti first in studies. Then I used it for my work at the World Health Organization. Now we are using it for many of our research activities at Consulto.
Basem Higazy
Co-founder and CEO of Consulto

Everything you need to analyze your qualitative data quickly

Import and organize interview data

Import and analyze any type of interview data – ATLAS.ti supports all standard text and transcription files such as Word and PFD, as well as audio and video recordings.

Analyze focus groups with ease and speed

Utilize easy-to-learn workflows that save valuable time, such as auto coding, sentiment analysis, team collaboration, and more.

Leverage AI-driven tools

Make efficiency a priority and let ATLAS.ti do your data analysis work with AI-powered research tools and features for faster results.

Visualize and present findings

With just a few clicks, you can create meaningful visualizations like charts, word clouds, tables, networks, among others.

The faster way to make sense of your focus group. Try it for free, today.

FAQ
What is a focus group?

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
What are some advantages of focus groups over other methods?

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.

What are good focus group questions?

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?
Are focus groups qualitative or quantitative?

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.

How can I code focus group data?

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").

How can I transcribe focus group interviews?

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.

How can I present the results of my focus group research?

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.