Speaker 1: It's particularly important before you do a focus group to prepare a lot and plan ahead. In the same way that a key informant interview requires that you do something quite efficiently and you're focused, focus groups even more so because it takes planning to get six to eight people in a room at the same time. It takes planning to make sure that you don't have one person who monopolizes the conversation. It takes planning to make sure that you are comfortable enough with the material and the questions that you can facilitate a discussion and follow where people go, allow the conversation to evolve such that everybody's participating, but also be able to intervene in an astute, non-terribly invasive way so that it doesn't totally derail the conversation. Focus groups are particularly dangerous when you are a very shy person. Don't do focus groups if you don't feel comfortable being in a group and commanding a group. You won't get very good data. People might monopolize the conversation and take it in a direction you're not comfortable going or becomes useless to you, but if you are not comfortable steering the conversation with people, it's not going to be good data and it would be better for you to do an in-depth interview. It's good to plan ahead thinking about how will you record the information. Often focus groups are best done if you can conduct them as a pair or even with a third person. The easiest way to collect information during a focus group is to videotape it because then you know who is speaking when. A focus group becomes really difficult to transcribe when you're not sure who's speaking. So a video camera really helps in the post-discussion time that you need to transcribe your information to be able to say, okay, person one spoke six times, person two spoke once, but said something very astute. Person three, you know, you can make notes about this, but if you're only using, if you're only taking notes or you're only using an audio recorder, then it becomes very difficult in that stage of research to disentangle who said what, when. At the same time, a video camera can make people really nervous. So if you use a video camera because it's efficient and it's an effective way to make sure you understand who's saying what, when, it might have the unintended consequence of making people feel nervous about the fact that they're being interviewed. So you do want to balance that with, and you would, you would have to get their permission. You want to make sure you get permission from people before you video or audio record them either way. That's a trade off. If you are not able to do video recording, if you think a video camera is going to make people feel inhibited, then you would want to audio record or take notes, in which case you also need to practice taking notes while multiple people are speaking. And that's why having another person or two people taking notes is very useful. Another thing that can be quite useful is to have a system in place where you or an assistant will take notes about who is speaking when, so that if you only have an audio recording, you can match the audio recording to the speaker after you've done the focus group. So you do as many focus groups as necessary to ensure that the important groups that you are giving voice to in your research have sufficiently answered your question. It is rarely sufficient to do one focus group to answer a research question if that is your only method of inquiry. It might be sufficient to do one focus group if you're using it in conjunction with other kinds of methods and you want people to explain what you've learned using other methodologies. If focus groups are the only or the main tool by which you're going to collect information for your research, then typically you would be doing at least four. And you will think about, do I need to do a focus group with only men, with only cisgender men, with married men, with, you know, on whatever criterion that is useful for you to ensure that people feel comfortable speaking and that you get enough diversity within those six to eight people, but a focus diversity. So otherwise, if everybody is the same within those six to eight people, then you might as well do one interview. That's much easier to plan for. The perfect focus group is a group where people feel comfortable enough to speak that they have sufficiently similar experiences that when one person speaks, it prompts another person to speak in a way that doesn't become combative or conflictual, that no, your representation of that experience is completely wrong and this was mine. Those can be very useful, but typically that makes focus group not go very well. And that would mean if you have those moments, it means that you would want to split those kinds of groups up.