Journal of Electoral Studies

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Focus Group: Theory and Application

Su-Feng Cheng
2005 / 05
Volume 12, No.1

pp.211-239
10.6612/tjes.2005.12.01.211-239
Paper

Abstract

Focus group research has become a popular technique for gathering qualitative data over the past two decades, and is used across a wide variety of different fields. But focus group hasn't drawn much attention in Taiwan's academic community. The application is mostly concentrated in marketing research. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to introduce the focus group research systematically to the Taiwan academic community, and hopefully this method can be adopted by more students. In this paper, the origins, development, strengths and weakness of focus group will be introduced. We will also introduce the steps of conducting focus group, and some useful process to manage and analyze the copious data produced by the group discussions.

Keywords

qualitative research

research design

recruitment

moderating

data analysis