The Report on Discussing Feelings in a Focus Group

The first half of this focus group conducted by moderator Peter Hart and Emory University is a in-depth discussion to have a conversation about the current political situation in America, particularly about the attitude that the participants have on Donald Trump’s presidency. The discussion is structured by a series of engagement questions and followed by exploration questions and exit questions to fully understand all the possible sentiments among US citizens who are represented by the participants in this group. Overall, through Peter Hart's strategic questioning, the focus group produced a wealth of contents on this sensitive and complex political topics during the 64-minute discussion, while maintaining the atmosphere of respect and ease.

First of all, the focus group moderator has contributed a lot to ensure the success of this discussion. He has cultivated sharing in an open and spontaneous way, ensuring that as many different ideas and perspectives as possible can be obtained from different people within the given time. Hart began by defining the focus groups for the participants, telling them that this was not a debate, a mediation group or an educational session, but an attempt to understand 'what's going on and how are you all feeling,' to set the tone for the group discussion. During the discussion, he has presented himself as an objective, accessible, professional and authoritative moderator from beginning to end. In the very beginning of the discussion, Hart welcomed the participants and confirmed that all participants agreed to be videotaped and quoted for later use. In my opinion, this is not only a mandatory step in researches, but also a source of respect for all participants. Hart was able to come up with everyone's name almost every time he asked a question, and tried to repeat accents and answers that might be difficult to hear later.

Political topics are sensitive in and out of themselves, so in addition to staying sharp and empathetic, Hart has stood out for believing and encouraging all participants to contribute something to the conversation, regardless of their political affiliation or social background. Cynthia, sitting to his left, is a good example. In the beginning of engagement questions, participants were divided into two distinct groups: most people thought the American political situation was negative and showed dissatisfaction with Trump, while only Cynthia thought the American political situation was positive and supported Trump as President. In such a situation, Cynthia's views could easily be swallowed up or attacked, but Hart repeatedly suggested that Cynthia offered a very different view and showed her view to be as important as the others. This has allowed the richness of the conversation and showed Hart's ability not only to keep his point of view out of the discussion, but also to properly manage such challenging topics and teams.

Throughout the focus group discussion, Hart strategically arranged questions to ensure the objectivity and fairness of the dialogue. The whole conversation is driven by ice-breaking questions, then positions are determined by each person's answer, and participants with different positions or nuances fully explain their answers. For example, I often hear the host say, 'can you explain your answer?' or 'what does this sentence/word mean?' This shows that the moderator is actively listening to ideas and clarifying them for everyone through thinking. At the same time, I did not find any participant in the conversation leading the direction of the conversation, which is also due to the skills of the moderator. Since the moderator has to keep the conversation neutral by allocating opportunities for participants with different viewpoints to express their opinions, he skillfully handles some of the more challenging participants. When a participant expresses too much, he has asked, 'thank you. let’s hear what others have to say,' or when a participant was embarrassed to express himself, he has made eye contact or called their name to encourage expression. These cues, both verbal and non-verbal, created an atmosphere of fairness and objectivity throughout the focus group.

Like any other focus group discussion, this conversation has offered deep and meaningful insight to a topic that is hard to measure and sensitive to discuss. It has acknowledged that people do not really know how they feel before they talk about it with people around them, which helps to dig up the precise attitude and information that surveys are not able to find. But achieving the same success as this focus group requires a lot of effort and planning on the part of the research team and facilitator, which is not something that every topic can afford or need. In most cases, the survey collected more attitudes and attributes from more people for the researchers in a shorter time period than focus groups. Also, even though focus groups tend to offer a deeper understanding of the collected information, the collected data are also hard to analysis. In this particular focus group, for example, even after an hour long of conversation, there is still not enough attitude that can be transferred into researchable quantitative or qualitative data, yet the effort to collect these limited source are very high.