Dimensional Research

Technology Market Research

In-depth Interviews or Focus Groups: A Reprise

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Ever since I published In-Depth Interviews vs. Focus Groups, almost two years ago, it has been our most visited blog post. Not only is it the most visited post of all time, it has also been the most visited article on this blog every month since it was published.

It seems to be pretty obvious that people are confused about the difference between the two most basic methodologies for conducting qualitative market research. As researchers, we continuously execute both types of research approaches and instinctively understand which will be best to meet the goals of a  particular project. But we need to be very clear with clients who are not research savvy.

I frequently find myself having these types of conversations with clients. I often get requests asking for a quote for a certain number of focus groups, but when we review the goals of the project, it may turn out there is an opportunity for much better results given the same budget if we were to do interviews instead – especially with competitive research or message validation.

I’ve learned a couple of things:

1. Don’t be afraid to suggest an alternative to a client if it’s right for the project.

Your job is to be an expert and provide the right research solution, not just deliver against the tactics of a client’s request.

2. Be clear and use simple terms when explaining research methodologies.

It’s easy to lapse into “researcher lingo,” but clients will resist alternates if they don’t understand them.

3. Use your best researcher listening skills to figure out why the client is asking for a specific approach.

Clients frequently don’t know alternatives exist. They may have observed a focus group once and saw good results and are asking for that because they don’t realize there are other approaches. It’s also typical that there is an unstated goal to expose a particularly difficult stakeholder to direct market feedback, in which case a focus group may be the right choice, even though other indicators would suggest in-depth interviews.

A Researcher’s Confession

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I admit it.  Although web surveys are one of our most popular research offerings, I strongly prefer qualitative research (focus groups, in-depth interviews).

I can’t help looking at the findings in web surveys and feel like I want to dig in and ask more questions.  The participants say things that don’t make sense to me and I want to know why.  Or they make short comments responding to open-ended questions that leave me with a dozen follow-on questions I don’t have the opportunity to ask.

When I present qualitative findings, I know I can answer any question that comes up with complete confidence.  With quantitative findings, I always know that there will be questions where the answer is, “We can’t draw any conclusions based on this survey.”

This came up again last earlier this month:  We just did a series of in-depth interviews where we wanted to understand perceptions about the cost of various alternatives.  All the participants in this study had identified themselves as product decision makers who had full visibility into costs – a requirement for the study.   If you had just looked at the first level of answers people gave, you would have thought that one of the tools we were looking at was very inexpensive compared to other options.

But because this was an in-depth interview, I got to ask that all-important “why” question. I quickly realized that while all the participants had been educated on the “line 3” costs that were billed directly to their organization, not everyone was aware of the additional “line 10” costs that had to be added to support this different approach.  When you added both of those up, the tool that originally appeared less expensive turned out to have a similar TCO to other options.

Now, it’s true that we could have found this out by writing a good web survey, but one of the secrets to writing great web surveys is to know the answers to all the questions first.  We continue to recommend web surveys as good vehicles for quantifying concepts that you know well, but want to put an accurate % by each of the options.  This is a valuable thing to do, especially for market sizing, external marketing and PR purpose.

But for finding out the answers that you don’t really know, start with qualitative research – and by all means do a web survey next to put those %s in place once you know the statements to put the %s with.

Dealing with “Group Think”

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Focus groups are ideal when you want to gain multiple perspectives in an interactive group setting.

However, one of the things that can happen in focus groups is “group think.” The first person starts off on a tangent – good or bad – and then the entire room goes along with that first opinion. This is a dynamic that every good researcher is aware of. 

So does groupthink invalidate a focus group? Of course not, and in fact it can be very useful as long as you know it’s happening and stop it when necessary. Here are a few tips:

  1. First, establish if group think is a good or a bad thing for your project.  Depending on your goals, group think can be a very bad thing. For example, in message testing you’re usually evaluating the kinds of pain/benefit statements that someone experiences in isolation. Groupthink is very damaging in that kind of environment because you end up seeing only one participant’s uneducated, unguided reaction to messages.  In this case, maybe focus groups are not the right medium – in-depth interviews or a Web survey may give you better results.
  2. Remember that group think can be very good.  If you’re trying to brainstorm an idea, having somebody to kick off the conversation and then see where the group goes with it is a very good thing. A smart moderator will encourage this kind of thinking for a while and see where it goes. The most creative ideas from focus groups I’ve been in did not come from one single individual. They came from the group members inspiring each other to build off of each other’s experiences and ideas and come up with something more powerful than any of the individual input. When one participants says “what if …”, and then the next participant says “cool idea, but how about this…” and then yet another participant says “or even better, you could take that idea and try…”.  Now you’re cooking!
  3. Be prepared to funnel groupthink.  When you see it happening, a good moderator will challenge the group with the opposite assumption.  Prompt some “group think” around the positive ideas, and then redirect the group to talk about the negative ideas. Insist that the group gives you multiple perspectives.

Above all – don’t be scared of negative group think! It’s very good to hear every possible objection your target audience can make about your solution BEFORE you start selling, so you can be prepared with the products, messages, and objection handling you need to be successful.

In-Depth Interviews, Focus Groups, or Both?

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When doing qualitative research, we need to decide which is right for the client: in-depth interviews, focus groups, or maybe a combination of both. This depends on the client’s goals.

When are focus groups better?

Dimensional Research recommends focus groups when the client wants to gain multiple perspectives in an interactive group setting.

One of the main benefits of focus groups is that they get the participants brainstorming. When one participant’s comment feeds off of another comment and so on, the group can really dig deep into an issue. When trying to evaluate market acceptance, capture challenges and issues, or understand objections to new technologies or processes, the focus group dynamic is ideal.

Focus groups have another great benefit – the client can sit behind the glass or on a conference call and hear the direct, unfiltered feedback of a large number of participants with no distractions. Focus group sessions are also recorded for further observation.  If your goal is to expose the maximum number of your team to direct input from the market, this is a very efficient way to do it.

When are interviews better?

In-depth, one-on-one interviews with technology professionals can be conducted in person or over the phone. These are appropriate when the client wants to identify detailed perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes.

In-depth interviews are particularly effective in the following scenarios:

  1. When the client’s goal is to capture feedback on experiences that occur in an isolated way, such as product messaging or product usability testing.
  2. When there is anything sensitive about the feedback that participants may not feel comfortable sharing in front of other people. They may be concerned a competitor is also be attending the focus group. Or in a win/loss analysis, a customer may not feel comfortable sharing details of poor account manager performance if they suspect the rep might be “behind the glass” and could hear him. The customer would feel much more comfortable sharing this information confidentially talking only with the researcher.

Two things that should NOT drive this decision are:

  • Travel – Sometimes the decision is driven by the geographical locations of participants. If you’re doing customer research with customers located in diverse locations or if you want global representation in the groups without the cost of travel, you still have a choice. The one-on-one nature of a phone interviews is an easy option, or for the group dynamic choose online focus groups.
  • Cost – An important consideration, of course, is cost. As a rule of thumb focus groups and interviews cost about the same per participant, so with the exception of travel – not a consideration for phone interviews or online focus groups – cost should not be the driving consideration in choosing the research approach.