How are focus groups different from surveys?

Why not just do a survey? Educators are trained to construct them. Students are used to completing them. Focus groups, on the other hand, require a different approach, one that most educators did not learn in their college courses. What is the advantage, then, of using focus groups?

The main contrasts

Surveys are an excellent way to figure out how strongly students feel about well-defined issues. It is easy to interpret answers to survey questions like these:

• Do you favor painting the gym red for the year 2002?

• On a scale of one (strongly agree) to five (strongly disagree), how do you respond to the following statement: "We need more counselors for 6th graders"?

It is not so easy, though, to know what students may have been thinking when they answered these questions. Would painting the gym red improve school spirit? Would more students want to come to school, or to after-school events? Is painting the gym the most important way to improve morale, or would improving lunch choices make more of a difference?

When asking about the need for more counselors, it would be difficult for survey designers to ask enough short questions to learn why people believe more counselors are or are not needed. Does the school already have more counselors than other comparable schools? Have more students than usual been subjected to trauma of some kind recently? Is student performance slipping, or is teacher morale sliding, and might more counseling for students help? Would adding more counselors help more than any other intervention? In focus groups, not surveys, students could talk with each other and with educators about these questions quite easily and usefully.

Focus groups can help you figure out why students feel the way they do about broader, less familiar issues. Even more important, focus groups make it possible to hear students think out loud and express their opinions in their own words. In a focus group, a researcher can see the development of attitudes and ideas right as they happen, through the interaction of the people present at the table.

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"We've used surveys quite a lot, and good ones, but it makes such a difference to hear the students' voices. That's what the focus groups made possible for us.


Superintendent Linda France,
Jessamine County Schools

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In contrast to the specific questions that surveys ask, focus groups make it possible to inquire about broader, "fuzzier" issues such as these:

• How is our school climate? What would improve it? What would make it worse?

• How are our 6th graders doing? How are our 6th grade teachers doing? What would make life better for both teachers and students?

Surveys or focus groups can be done well, or they can be done poorly. Presuming high quality in each case, however, researchers often advise using focus groups to uncover themes, issues, and topics that are harder to understand, newer, or less familiar. Once some understanding of the issues begins to emerge from focus groups, it becomes possible to follow up with more specific questions using surveys or other quantitative measures.

Here are more contrasts...

Surveys make it possible to reach large numbers of students with a few specific, short-answer questions. When well done, even sampling a relatively small portion of a large population will make it possible to predict the views of the whole population.

Focus groups, on the other hand, make it possible to ask broader and sometimes more complex questions to a much smaller number of students, who respond without preset categories and who take part in a conversation in which they may influence each other's views. Focus groups offer an opportunity to "really get it" - to understand what is going on and why people think and feel the way they do about a hard or touchy subject. Finally, in contrast to surveys, which typically do not generate much ownership in the people who respond, a series of focus groups can build openness to or ownership of new policies and practices. Students who come together to talk about a school's needs and opportunities are more likely to care about what happens with implementing changes.

Differences in appropriate topics

Let's look more closely at the kinds of topics that are best for focus groups and contrast them with appropriate survey topics.

As stated earlier, focus groups are most appropriate for broader, more exploratory topics. Focus groups work best when you want to hear as much as possible about what is on people's minds, and you do not want to limit people's responses to a small number of options. Here are several themes for which we offer a contrast between the main question that focus groups could address and questions that could be the basis of a survey.

If report card design is your theme:

Focus groups: What do students want in a report card? How do these views vary according to student age?

Survey: How many students in each grade prefer free response report cards? How many prefer letter or number grades without comment?

If the tension between academics and athletics is your theme:

Focus groups: What goals should our school hold for athletics and academics? How can we improve our performance in both arenas?

Survey: How strongly do people agree or disagree with specific additional investments in sports? In academics?

If the student experience is your theme:

Focus groups: What is it like to be a student at our school?

Survey: In considering how satisfied you are with your experience here at our school, please rank each of the following items as a 3 (very satisfied), 2 (somewhat satisfied), or 1 (not very satisfied):

• The way my teachers teach
  
• The condition of restrooms
  
• School dances
  
• Variety of courses available
  
• Access to counselors
  
• Variety and quality of lunches and breakfasts
  
• Number and type of clubs
  
• Locker conditions
  
• Opportunity to learn from the community as well as the classroom

Focus groups are not better than surveys. Focus groups are more appropriate when you want to hear what people are thinking, using their own words. Focus groups are also more appropriate when you want to develop a deeper understanding of a complex issue. Surveys are better if you want information about specific, narrowly described topics and options. Both tools have their place in research about schools. A great deal has been written and taught about using surveys in schools. This Toolkit aims to make it easier for school communities to use focus groups as well, when appropriate.

Next: What are the pros and cons of focus groups?