What is a focus group? What indeed? There has been some considerable demonising of the technique and blaming it for the obvious problems of issue management and policy absences during the campaign. Programs like the Hollow Men and general media comments on party apparatchiks set up the image of small groups determining what is on offer. But as a long term practitioner and teacher of research methods, I want to set the record straight by pointing out the apparent gross misuse of a very useful tool.

When I learned about what were then called group discussions in the 1960s, they were something used by canny advertisers to suss out how people really saw their products. I was trained to run them when working for a market research firm run by an ex university Psych Lecturer, Dr Peter Kenny. Pushed out of academe, he went commercial and sold his useful services to up and coming advertisers like John Singleton, after training Hugh Mackay at the ABC.

The primary purpose of properly run focus groups as a marketing tool is to work out how to sell a product by understanding what people think and feel about it. A free flowing discussion, not question and answers, gives insight into both initial responses and how views are defended and changed. So the way the ‘product’ is discussed between group participants provides clues to how it can be sold.

If competently interpreted, the advice being given to political parties could not result in the current policy platitudes and sales pitch, unless the ‘product’ to be discussed was very dull. If there was any imagination in the products and proper processes were followed, we would not be reliant on gender, dog whistles and internecine personal warfare to provide the main interest in the last three weeks.

The miasma of boring policy announcements is apparently due to excessive omissions of anything likely to excite the wrong plebs and results in the general lack of issue engagement by the ‘customer’. The researchers seem to have had really thick party apparatchik clients who tested the wrong things.

No one needs focus groups to tell them that immigration, boat people, crime, tax, the unemployed and youth will raise anxieties and prejudices. The correct use of focus groups would be for finding out how sensible policies could be sold in this area and slogans like ‘stop the boats’ is not in that category.

Well run focus groups are a very powerful way of understanding how the public sees an issue in the broad context of all the other factors that are influencing their views. They depend on moderators who diligently listen to members of the group exploring an initially very broad prompt on the topic being considered. The concept came from a disciple of Freud. Ernest  Dichter in USA who invented the technique to develop better  marketing.

He was into minimal stimuli of the discussants, eg put them in the room with a product or clue on the table and see how long it took them to notice or even if they ever did.

The idea is to let participants react normally to issues, ie ignore what wasn’t of interest, get excited about what was and discuss it with a limited group of six to eight others. This number allowed for the normal interaction between a small group of people who would have diverse reactions and interests.

The moderators/researchers need to minimise their initial authority that comes from their status and not ask direct questions in the early stages at least. Some people use one way mirrors, others just maintain silences or even leave the room briefly to encourage the group to discuss the raised issue amongst themselves.

This usually creates rich responses: feelings, avoidance, interest, preferences and other perceptions and preferences that can be used to work out how to ‘sell’ an issue.

It is a qualitative technique that should never be used to generalise views from the small number of focus groups (maybe 4-8) to the wider population.

If carefully analysed for tone and body language as well as what is said and how, it can give insights into feelings and attitudes that quantitative surveys cannot. It needs high level skills both to run and interpret the data. Firstly making yourself almost invisible in the group, so members stop trying to find out the answers you want, and talk freely amongst themselves and you can later do some probing.

Secondly viewing and/or listening to original recordings of the groups and picking your way carefully through what is said and not said and how the processes developed. And that is both slow and expensive.

So the technique has been cannibalised. After all who wouldn’t like to find a nice cheap easy way of reading public attitudes? And what could be easier than pay some 30 or 40 people to come into rooms with a few strangers and be questioned about their views. I have seen what seems more like a group question session called a focus group — the paid participants want to either please or impress the paymaster and be invited back so they try and oblige with the correct answers. Conversations tend to be with the researcher, not with each other and responses are clearly prompted by assumptions of what is wanted.

Then new technology now comes into play in the analysis, where texts or recordings are put through programs such as cloud analysis and counts of the frequency of particular words or phrases and comes to conclusions on what is said. This misses out the vital dimension of exploring how people get to the views they express, their tone, hesitancies, tensions and avoidances. Who leans back and says nothing? Who changes their views because of what others say? Who argues the issues? Who gets excluded or judged on what they say?

That’s where the power of the technique comes from, not the quick and dirty stuff that must be driving the badly boring ‘products’ voters have on offer.

The successes of advertisers in selling the public on brands and products through clever use of measures of attitudes and feelings finally found its way into politics in the eighties. Now policy development seems to shared between bad readings of focus groups and what spin doctors think they can sell. Neil Lawrence, who did the Kevin 07 campaign said recently in The Australian. “In the wrong hands, problems arise. Focus groups replace real policy development based on principles — and leadership becomes a reflection or shadow of the findings.”

What more can I say?