Design a Focus Group Study

Design a complete focus group study for the following:

Organisation: [company or institution]
Research question: [what you need to understand from this focus group]
Business or research context: [why this matters and what will be done with findings]
Target participants: [describe who you need — demographics, behaviours, experience]
Number of groups: [1 / 2 / 3 / 4 groups]
Group size: [6-8 / 8-10 participants per group]
Format: [in-person / online / hybrid]
Duration per session: [60 / 90 / 120 minutes]
Moderator: [internal / external / yourself]
Budget for incentives: [amount per participant]

Design the complete study:

SAMPLING AND RECRUITMENT:
- Participant profile definition
- Homogeneous vs heterogeneous group composition decision
- Screening questionnaire (10 questions)
- Recruitment approach
- Incentive recommendation and justification
- Informed consent process

DISCUSSION GUIDE:

OPENING (10 minutes):
- Welcome script
- Ground rules
- Warm-up exercise
- Introductions format

EXPLORATORY SECTION (20-30 minutes):
- Open-ended questions to surface unprompted views
- Projective techniques (if applicable)
- Laddering questions to get to underlying motivations

CORE TOPIC SECTIONS (40-60 minutes):
For each major research area:
- Stimulus introduction (concept, prototype, or scenario if applicable)
- Core discussion questions
- Probing questions
- Ranking or sorting exercises
- Devil's advocate prompts

CLOSING (10 minutes):
- Summary and reflection question
- Anything not covered prompt
- Final word exercise

MODERATOR GUIDE:
- Facilitation techniques for common focus group problems
- Handling dominant participants
- Drawing out quiet participants
- Managing group conformity bias
- Probing without leading
- Note-taking approach while moderating

ANALYSIS PLAN:
- Immediate debrief process (right after each session)
- Cross-group analysis framework
- How to weight contradictory views
- Verbatim coding approach
- Insight extraction framework

REPORTING:
- Report structure
- How to use verbatim quotes effectively
- Presenting findings to non-research stakeholders
- Limitations section template