[Sigia-l] Alternative Focus Group Methods

[Donna Maurer]

You know, on that continuum, contextual enquiry is even more useful than 
focus groups. If you don't know what the issues are, there's a pretty 
good chance that you won't know what questions to ask, and there's 
nothing more boring than an unstructured, unfocused focus group ;)  
Doing some observation first will at least give a better idea of the 
questions so they can be sensibly discussed by the group...

D

Eric Scheid wrote:

>and if you don't even know what the questions are which you are hoping to
>answer, then *that* is when focus groups come in handy -- they are better at
>this "issues exploration and values determination" problem than other
>methods.
>
>What I learned is that focus groups sit at one end of a continuum of
>certainty ... which stretches from "we don't even know what the issues are"
>through to "we know the issues, we know the goals, we know the problems, we
>know the approaches .. we just need some fiddly quantifiable measurements so
>we can tune the instrument". Focus groups sit at one end of that continuum,
>guess which one.
>
>e.
>
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-- 
Donna Maurer
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blog: http://maadmob.net/donna/blog/
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