Dear Paula and Jocelyn,

On Monday, June 10, you wrote:

"If anyone on the List has any experience working with focus groups
in a museum setting....."
...............................................................................
If you have not run across it previously, David Morgan's book on
focus group procedures is useful.

     Morgan, David L., Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the State
     of the Art, Sage Publications, 1993; Newbury Park, USA.

The observations below are based on the presumption that you plan
to use one or more focus groups as your sole source of information on
the attitudes of one or more publics towards your museum.  If so, I
would like to discourage you from doing so.  If not, I apologize for my
presumption AND for my gratuitous comments.

You already know the topics for discussion for your focus
group (you know what information you require), but I recommend you avoid
a standard question-answer format.  Focus groups, although the
topics for discussion are very carefully planned, are not supposed to
appear structured to the participants; one topic leads naturally to
the next and, so long as the topics of concern are introduced
naturally by either the participants or the moderator, no questions
are asked.   The more spontaneous the discussion, the less the
participants are inhibited and  the more revealing are the results....
 at least that is the general idea..

I have found focus groups very useful in certain kinds of museum
"visitor research," because they produce QUESTIONS I would never have
thought to ask despite twenty-plus years of working in museums and
researching museum publics; or they provide answers to questions
that do not require general confirmation (e.g., are the labels legible? is
there some possibility that they might be misunderstood?)  But if you are
interested in learning about public attitudes towards your museum or why
people do or do not become members, focus groups can only be a first step.
However much you attempt to get balanced representation in a focus group,
they are not representative of the populations from which they were drawn.

A survey of a randomly-selected sample of the populations from which
you draw visitors/members is the only means by which representative
attitudes can be determined.  That survey will produce much better
results than it might otherwise have done because of the questions
generated by the focus group procedures, but one is not a substitute
for the other.  And, despite arguments from some organizations that
specialize in conducting focus groups, the focus group result is NOT
better than nothing if you cannot afford to do a survey.  Focus group
results can as easily mislead as inform its users.  If you can only
do one thing, do the survey.  Contact a local college with a business
school.  It gives them good practice with a real-life problem and you
get inexpensive research results on which you can rely.
Florida University has a superb consumer behavior group and would
likely be willing to help.

Clearly, focus groups are relatively inexpensive to conduct and very, very
tempting because they can be used to produce results that look just like those
produced by a survey.  This is the statistical equivalent of "if you
pay peanuts you get monkeys."

Good luck...   bob kelly
Robert F. Kelly, Chair, Marketing Division
(604) 822-8346  Fax: 822-8521

University of British Columbia
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