Focus Groups / Group Discussions

Focus groups are one of the most popular methods of conducting market research - and for good reason.

They provide excellent insight into the perception and opinion of a specific target audience, all while giving participants the floor to divulge, discuss and elaborate on certain topics.

Our highly-experienced qualitative research team will work with you to craft the perfect recruitment screener - one that targets, labels, and identifies your desired participants with professional precision. There can be little room for misjudgement when it comes to the recruitment screener - it's arguably one of the most important elements in the market research process, as it ensures you'll be speaking to the right audience. We find recruitment screener design so important that we even include it in all of our recruitment packages as standard practice.

Gone are the scraps of paper with a rough outline sketched on both sides. We'll deliver a professional looking document that outlines your research goals, recruitment criteria, full screening questionnaire, and put every relevant bit of information into one place.

Note: a lot of our client's do approach us with readily-designed screeners - this is completely fine, and we'll incorporate your questionnaire into our project brief document (we will always, as a matter of procedure, cast our own expert eye over such submissions and advise if we feel there could be improvements).

All screeners require client approval before launch. Once approved, it will be programmed and coded onto our own system.

In addition to this, should you require a moderator, our moderation team will connect with you for a short consultation before drafting the discussion guide. We will outline your aims and goals and build a flexible yet robust approach that aims to get the best from your respondents.

Once the client has approved the respondent recruitment screener the 'internal' market research field recruitment team (to ensure the very best and genuine respondents we do not use external recruiters) begins the process of recruitment. Often, our first port of call includes contacting our vast database with a blind requirement (unlike most other agencies - and to ensure truthful responses - we will not 'lead' respondents by giving them details of the project requirement). Our registered respondents will then complete the online screener which will assess their suitability for the research. As standard policy, participants can only complete the recruitment screener once, they are not allowed to backspace or 'retry' after receiving a screen-out, and we do not openly discuss the exact criteria for any project, ever.

Recruitment screeners are made in a way that it's impossible for respondents to tell who we're really looking for. Duplicitous and 'professional respondents' can never be fully avoided - we'd be lying if we said otherwise - but our fully blind and tested system and protocols ensures a very limited instance of such individuals (less than 1%).

Where the database hasn't returned suitable respondents, or where we need a little more interest, we'll then turn to outreach as we have a foothold in many local community groups, local services, and social media campaigns - so we turn to these first, before making new, local connections if necessary.

All respondents are triple checked to confirm suitability. This is how we guarantee a good quality sample in all of our self-recruited focus groups. Respondents are blind screened, actively spoken to by a member of our team to verify that their details match (we often re-ask key questions again, checking their responses match), and in some cases where participants are classed as 'hard-to-reach', we will even request proof or check suitability.

MRFGR have an enormous resource of all types and size of focus group venues provided through our trusted venue partners both domestically and internationally. We will work with you and our partners to source a great value, perfect venue that can deliver on your full requirements, whether that be a purpose built focus group viewing facility with one-way mirrors, food, beverage and snacks for observers and respondents, video/audio recordings of the session, accessibility needs, live-streaming, and more or just a simple small community space (such as a village hall or similar).

Whatever you need from your venue, we'll help you find it. As venues aren't something we don't offer 'personally', we won't make any money on venue costs. You can rest assured that the price we quote you is the same as was given to us by the venue.

We'll also help you with any other additional services you require - from translation, to transcription, and incentive handling.

In addition to managing venue requirements, we will help with the day-to-day preparation and management of the focus groups, often including the little things that most people don't think about.

We'll organise catering for both observers and respondents, ensuring all dietary restrictions are adhered to, maps and directions are easily understood, manage the schedule of attendees to guarantee everyone gets there at the right time, and the venue is adequately set-up for your arrival.

We also handle all consent and conform and adhere to necessary GDPR guidelines as we appreciate that GDPR can affect each project - to a large degree - differently, but we will discuss with all of our client's at the commencement of a project what is required or optional. What's more, we'll help you meet those guidelines ourselves. This often involves us handling consent between participants and the clients, getting the signatures on the right bit of paper, ensuring the project runs according to local laws, and that all data is held and transferred securely, with adequate protection.

We also continue to manage respondents during this time. Just because they're recruited doesn't mean our job is over. We will touch base with them several times before their session (including the morning or afternoon of the research) to reconfirm their attendance which ensures our tried and tested way of assuring high attendance (having reached 95%+ attendance levels across the board for 15 plus years!).

Moderation is the guiding light through all focus group settings. We have a team of highly trained and expert moderators who have experience in various sectors and industries, including those experienced with business decision makers, vulnerable adults, children, healthcare patients, or just general consumers.

All of our moderators provide a short briefing beforehand and a de-brief once the session has taken part.

In almost all instances, the moderator assigned to your project will deliver bullet-points of the key-findings (included in the moderation package).

Further reporting and analysis services are available and delivered by our skilled qualitative team, all of whom have been writing market research reports and analysis for years. We offer Executive Summaries (3-8 pages) which highlight the key findings, or an in-depth report (8+ pages) which provides more detailed insight.

Example reports are available upon request.