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 [log in to unmask]