Improve your online market research focus groups

Losing opinions can seriously damage your session

One thing I am often asked when talking to clients about online market research and virtual advisory tips is, “How can we more effectively moderate participants, especially when they are online?” This is a particularly important point for the following reasons:

• You can often have a particular set of personality profiles in one session.
• Being online instead of face-to-face can exacerbate certain behaviors, which are explained below.
• A computer session should be varied to keep the attention of the participants.

In this article, we will look at the above issues and how simply by using multi-user interactions we can effectively mitigate them and gain better quality and a deep understanding of the opinions and advice given by the group.

Is this an important topic?

If much. When you have a group online, especially experts in their field, you will find particular personalities that come up over and over again. These will include people who are dominant, who can speak first and louder, and can be quite intimidating to others. Participants who are shy and want to avoid confrontation, without necessarily revealing what they really think. Those who play devil’s advocate, adopting opposite points of view. Experts who get distracted by email or their smartphone. Or people who are worried about something else and never really get involved with it. While a good moderator can mitigate these to some extent, the danger is that as the session progresses, some of these factors will continue to exist, negatively impacting the quality of the report.

What is the technique that can help?

We define the “e-vate capture” paradigm that uses specific interactive sequences at the beginning of each section of the virtual advisory board to mitigate these problems. A simple example would be a section to discuss who is the important manufacturer to you when you decide to buy a new car. Everyone could be asked the question, but if instead we show a scale interaction of importance to the group, and everyone uses it to express their opinion in isolation, we can pass this information on to the moderator or chair, before starting the discussion. . There are a number of advantages in using this technique before a rich qualitative discussion. Everyone discloses an opinion, allowing the moderator / chair to efficiently lead the discussion, spot any subgroups of opinions, direct time efficiently by spending more time on topics where there are key differences, and see if opinions change afterwards of the discussion.

How does this affect personalities?

Using this technique at least at the beginning of each topic of discussion ensures that all opinions are expressed without the dominant characters affecting others, giving those who feel intimidated an equal voice, keeping experts interested and committed through the activities and avoiding that people with a tendency to play Devil’s Advocate for being able to do so, since they do not know other opinions when they vote.

Taking Interactions Further: Your Ideas

The example above is a simple vote, but there are many other types of interactions that come in handy, from drag and drop, timelines, to brainstorming. Do you have any ideas for interactions that you’ve seen work well with live focus groups or advisory panels and wonder how they can be provided online? Use the link below to view the full article on the online market research advice portal.