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| Students Speak Toolkit > II. The Focus Group Blueprint > A. Design > 7. Identify the types of students to recruit for each group. |
Once you have decided on the structure of the focus groups and extent of their homogeneity, your work team is ready to identify the specific types of students to recruit for each group. These are largely issues of diversity and what you want your focus groups to look like. Consider the following questions:
What kinds of diversity exist among the students at your school (or in your district)?
You may have addressed many of these factors already when structuring your groups, particularly if you decided to conduct groups that are homogeneous in several ways. It's likely, though, that your participants will be mixed on at least a few factors. Here are examples of the kinds of characteristics that you may want to include in some or all groups:
Decide which factors have the most relevance in your school community and to your specific focus group topic. Ideally, focus group participants will closely "mirror" the actual student population of an individual school. For example, if minority students make up 40 percent of your school population and you plan to involve ten participants in a group, a "mirroring" approach means that you will need to recruit at least four minority students for each group. Since the aim of a focus group is to acquire many different views and opinions, you generally want to recruit a variety of students. Keep in mind, though, that the more diverse characteristics you intentionally build into the sample, the more complicated your sampling and recruiting process will be.
Depending on your topic, certain diversity factors may have an impact on how students respond to your questions. In Jessamine County, for example, work team members considered what kinds of diversity might make a difference in how safe or unsafe a student felt at school. Members determined that length of time in a particular building might make a difference in how safe or unsafe a student felt at school, and they debated whether or not first-year students (6th graders in middle school and 9th graders in high school) should be included in focus groups set to take place in October, only a few weeks after the beginning of the school year. Some participants asserted that these first-year students' feelings about school safety might stem more from general insecurities or their own "newness" than actual school conditions, which would make a difference in how the students responded to questions. Other participants felt that first-year students' responses were still valid and important to the results. In the end, the Jessamine County work team decided to include first-year students in both the middle and high school groups.
Once you decide on the kinds of diversity to take into account, figure out how many students reflecting each set of diverse characteristics to include in each focus group. For example, do you want an equal number of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in a middle school group or do you want twice as many 7th graders as 6th graders? Figure out a ratio of students that will tell you the most. In Jessamine County, the work team agreed to have two students from each grade in the high school groups, and three 6th graders, two 7th graders, and three 8th graders in the middle school groups.
Comfort in Numbers
If you recruit students into several different diversity categories, you should always include at least two students for each category, for reasons of comfort. For example, if you recruit students on the basis of race, you should always recruit at least two students from each race category in the group so that no participant feels singled out.
At one middle school in Fayette County, the work team decided to conduct separate groups of male and female students for each grade level. Members then recruited two Caucasian students, two African American students, two Hispanic students, one Asian student, and one student from another ethnic background for each group, in order to address their research topic of cultural barriers. Members of a Fayette County high school work team structured one focus group so that among the nine participants, five students had a "high" socioeconomic status and four students had a "low" socioeconomic status, five students were at or above grade level and four were functioning at or below grade level, four were Caucasian students, three were African American students, and two were Hispanic students.
Because your work team, or many members on it, will have legal access to student records, it should be relatively easy to create groups that reflect predetermined rough percentages based on recorded factors such as race/ethnic background, age, and average grade performance. In Fayette County, Central Office staff members conducted the random samples based on criteria available in their school databases. You may want to contact someone in your district's Central Office who might be able to offer similar assistance with the random samples. Later in this Toolkit we describe the entire process of drawing a random sample that meets certain criteria in terms of percentages. Here we are suggesting topics for consideration and decisions that will shape how the sample is constructed.
Some diversity factors may not be easily determined through school lists. For example, school lists probably won't tell you if a student is involved in extracurricular activities or rides the bus. Though your work team is operating without full information at this point, you still need to make tentative decisions about whether any additional diversity factors are crucial enough to your research to warrant the extra work of screening student participants.
Depending upon your topic, you may need to exclude specific segments of the student population from the focus group research. For example, if your research seeks to determine how student views about a certain topic have changed over time, you may want to exclude students who are new to your school or school system or who have only been enrolled in it a short amount of time. In Jessamine County, the work team excluded all students who had not been in the school system for at least one year prior to the current school year.
You may also want to consider excluding students whose parents are employed by the school system or serve on the school board or school council, in order to ensure impartiality and to encourage free responses by other participants.
Note: Don't assume that you automatically need to exclude students with special needs, such as English as a Second Language (ESL) students or students with disabilities. With a little ingenuity, you can include these students as participants, should they be selected through the random sample. At one Fayette County middle school, for example, some of the focus group participants were ESL students. In order to compensate for any language barriers, another student sat in on the focus groups and served as a translator. In another group at the middle school, a special education aide accompanied a student with disabilities who participated.
We know you wouldn't...but we strongly discourage you from creating exclusionary categories that rule out students whose views you fear may be negative or unpleasant. It's important for you to want to know whatever is on students' minds about the topic your inquiry addresses.
When you have finalized all of these decisions about the types of students you intend to recruit into a specific set of focus groups, write your decisions down carefully. They will form the basis for the first step in drawing a random sample: the development of the "slot sheet." Read a detailed example of a team's decisions about recruitment.
Next: Make decisions about the logistics of the recruitment.
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