Designing a questionnaire - focus groups

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Key points

Designing an effective questionnaire is difficult. If you want to do some research and think that putting together a questionnaire yourself is a cheap way of doing it, you would be better advised to hire a freelance marketing researcher whose time will almost certainly cost less than yours. You should also consider hiring a cheap field force to conduct the interviews, and the same freelance marketing researcher to analyse and report the results.

However, if you feel that you want a foundation in questionnaire design because it is something you wish to build a competence in, here are some hints and tips.

Know what you really need to know

The key thing you should work out before you write your questionnaire is what you need to know - really need to know. It is usually more effective to conduct a series of research projects than to try to find out everything at once (the "biblical" approach to questionnaire writing). One piece of learning often changes your perspective, and therefore the questions you want to ask, so take it in manageable chunks. Besides, most people cannot digest a lot of new information in one sitting.

Four exercises can help here:

1. "Ladder" what you think you want to know - ask "Why?", then ask "Why?" again. Brainstorm what you think people could say, and ask what will be the consequences of each possible outcome
2. Create an hypothesis that you want to test, and ensure that the research will either support it or disprove it. A hypothesis is where you say "I believe that........" The research should test whether you are right or wrong
3. Draw up a sample report (or ask your marketing researcher to do so). What will the results physically look like? Could another design give you more actionable answers?
4. Discuss the proposed questionnaire with your colleagues. The main problem with marketing research is not getting the answers to your questions, but getting anyone to buy into the results. You should get your colleagues on board with what you are doing as early as possible, and get them involved in imagining different scenarios based on the results

Different types of research

There are several different types of research which require different formats of questionnaire. The main ones are:

1. Focus group discussion guides
2. In-depth individual interviews
3. Quantitative telephone interviews
4. Hybrid questionnaires, that are part exploratory and part qualitative. These are especially used in business-to-business environments
5. Interviews based on a specific research models/techniques (e.g. conjoint analysis, conversion model)
6. Self-completion questionnaires (postal/mail questionnaires or electronic questionnaires

Focus group discussion guides

The focus group is an example of exploratory/qualitative research, and is used when you do not know what answers the interviewees will give (the alternative - quantitative research - is used when you do know what the range of likely answers is; you simply do not know how many people will give each answer).

Exploratory research is aimed at gaining either a broad or a deep understanding of the market place:

• the broad understanding of the market gives you a general picture from which you can ask more detailed questions during the quantitative research phase. What you are looking for here are not answers, but better defined questions
• the deep understanding of the market is where you are looking for information that you would not necessarily be able to get on a quantitative basis. The most powerful information in research is often unobtainable quantitatively

So, qualitative research is about getting valid knowledge of your market place, without formally counting how many people said what.

A typical focus group is a discussion between 6-10 participants, guided by a moderator, on whatever topic is being investigated. It will usually last around 1.5 to 2 hours, but can be extended up to 4 hours if you are adding a creative problem solving session. In France it may last that long anyway. It can take place in a specialist research facility, a hotel conference room, or someone's home, and is often watched live by the client within the room itself, through a two-way mirror, or by closed circuit TV. The session will be recorded for the research team to use during the analysis and report writing phase, but it can be very powerful to have it filmed on video to accompany the findings in short sound bites (for instance on CD-Rom). Your customers can often deliver the punchline more convincingly than you can. It is traditional to offer participants an incentive for attending (quite a large one, if they are professional people - equivalent to their loss of earnings), and refreshments.

You need to conduct at least 3 focus groups as you are likely to get one "rogue" group where you are given answers that are very different from the norm. If you only commission one focus group, you do not know whether it is a rogue group or not; if you commission two that disagree with one another, you do not know which one is the rogue. As you may be looking at different sets of people in your market place, the usual number of focus groups commissioned is 4, 6, 8, 10 or 12. The number of groups you run is dictated by how many different segments of the market you are examining (e.g. by age, sex, geography, attitude, situation, behavior etc.).

A focus group questionnaire is called a "discussion guide", and is more of a check list of questions than a fully structured questionnaire. This is because the trick with focus groups is to put the group firmly in charge, and only to guide them round the topic as the research objectives dictate. Having said that, you will usually have one person who tries to dominate the group, and another couple who would prefer to say nothing, so you will have the difficult task of quietening one of them down, and of livening the other two up.

The full format of a discussion guide will run something like:

1. a broad introduction to the objectives of the research, sufficient to orientate the participants and put them at their ease, but not so specific as to bias the results, or compromise the client
2. a brief introduction to the rules of focus groups - everything said and done is confidential and will not be used outside the room except for the purposes of this research; every statement is right; please do not hesitate to disagree with someone else; but do not all talk at once
3. ask people to describe who they are and say a few words on some gentle topic introduced by the moderator (to get everyone to say something). An example might be "What is your favorite TV program?"
4. introduce another very general, non-threatening question (again ensuring that everyone says something). An example might be "Where do you do most of your food shopping, and why?"
5. introduce the topic under review, but from a wider perspective than the client is specifically interested in. If you are investigating cleaning products, you might ask "Do you wash up immediately after you have eaten or sometime later on?"
6. ask increasingly more precise questions on the topic under review. For cleaning products you may cover who does the cleaning, how often, when, what products are used and why, what is good/bad about them, which brands they prefer, what they really hate about cleaning, what makes them feel good, what they think of the packaging/advertising, where they buy them etc.
7. introduce some games, known as "projective techniques", once you start discussing the topic under review. There are many projective techniques, some of which include:
• completing the bubbles - where you have two people/objects talking to each other. What would they be saying?
• impersonation - how would the brand/product/service behave if it were a human being?
• complete the sentence - give participants the start of a sentence, and then get them to finish it
• draw the brand/product/service in the context of where you would use it

8. get participants to react to concepts, products or advertisements. You may have something you are working on. Test it out, without being so specific as to lose intellectual property rights of course
9. bring the meeting to a close by summarising the main points
10. you may introduce the client at the end of the session to say thank you

The first task in a focus group is to get everyone warmed up, so you discuss "safe" topics and ensure that everyone says something. As a rough guide, the first 15-20 minutes should be used this way. If you succeed in this, the other task will be to ensure that the group does not get out of hand and covers the topics to which you want answers. The general flow of a group discussion is to go from the very general to the very specific, punctuating by "excursions" (activities and games).

European focus groups aim primarily to dig deep into the underlying drivers and causation of behavior on a psychological level, and are often run by trained psychologists. They want to achieve a rounded understanding of the participants' experience of the topic. In the US, moderators will usually take scores from the interviewees. This helps to get a sense of whether one person is leading the group into a particular line of responses, or whether views are generally held, but it also stops the flow of the conversation and can get in the way of obtaining a "deeper" understanding and more intimate disclosures. In Europe, some research agencies use rigorous content analysis to generate numerical results, not so as to provide statistically reliable information, but rather to get a more accurate picture of what was being said by the interviewees. One of the problems with exploratory research is that, because you are not collecting numbers, you can pay undue attention to the most articulate people you interview. Rigorous content analysis avoids this problem.

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