I know people who are in favor and people who are against the market studies carried out with the Group Sessions technique. In both cases, there are professionals specialized in the Marketing area, as well as professionals and businessmen whose training or activity is not related to it.
Certain problems of substance and form generate dissatisfaction with qualitative studies and the situation is aggravated when considering that there are those who feel fully satisfied, despite the bad work that is being done with them.
Interviewees
Much of the reluctance to use the technique has to do with the recruitment processes of the participants, which on many occasions do not meet the profile of the market segment to be studied, they turn out to be a kind of 'experts' invited with certain frequency of this type of study, or the sessions end up 'falling out' because the minimum number of participants necessary to carry it out has not attended.
The recruitment of participants is so procedural that it can be easily solved by putting particular care at each stage of the recruitment process.
More serious than that is the statistical representativeness that some people incorrectly expect from a technique that should not and cannot provide it. Qualitative studies are essentially exploratory in nature, not conclusive. It seeks to understand something, not describe it, much less in quantitative terms.
It is surprising how some qualitative researchers handle the technique as a descriptive, quantitative and conclusive task, distancing it from its exploratory nature in depth.
Researchers
This problem is greater among executives who used to be information users and decision makers in a company, executives and researchers who previously worked in a market research agency, and young people recently graduated from university, without professional experience.
When executives leave their previous job, or when young people finish their professional career, they have seen a good opportunity in market research since they recognize the need to support the market orientation of companies with information, they know potential clients and they are more or less familiar with the work process in general terms.
Many are inclined to offer their qualitative research services in general, or group sessions in particular, because they see a requirement of a lower initial investment to set up their own agency, a work procedure much easier to follow than strict controls. which requires quantitative research, both in design and in the field and in information analysis, but mainly because the contribution margin is higher. This same reasoning leads many quantitative researchers to supplement their job offerings by adding group session studies to their list of services.
Another reason to privilege the offer of qualitative studies over descriptive ones is the apparently obvious possibility of being artistically guided by your intuition during the work process. It is assumed that anyone has the capacity to set up adequate facilities, recruit participants, moderate the sessions and perform the information analysis. The problem is not the lack of experience, which after all is acquired with correct practice, but the incorrect application of a research technique.
Design
When using the technique erroneously, the group sessions are used to apply a descriptive questionnaire, based on open or closed questions, which the moderator asks to be answered in order to tabulate responses in the room itself. And worse still, sometimes requesting an inappropriate group consensus.
The group application of a questionnaire is given, instead of leaving the group to interact to deepen the study topics, wasting valuable time on tasks of another nature such as writing answers, either individually or in groups.
The worst effect that this error causes is that the questionnaires thus designed and applied lead to obtaining precisely what all those involved, clients and researchers, expect and wish to obtain.
What is the right thing to do?
Exploratory studies, for which group sessions are just one of the techniques, correspond to a first step in market research. Its purpose is to explore a purchasing behavior topic in depth to learn something about it and possibly take advantage of that new knowledge during the design of a descriptive study.
A group session consists of a face-to-face conversation between various consumers of products or users of services. The interaction should occur between them, not with the moderator and less with the observers, wherever they are at the time of the session.
The interview guide used to conduct this interaction is just that, a guide. A list of conversation topics that the moderator must trigger during the session. It shouldn't even be a list of questions that everyone expects interviewees to answer.
A group session is a social situation, a reflection of what happens in real life, only in circumstances under the control of the research team. Just as we do not expect respondents to make purchasing decisions in real life sitting at a discussion table, so we must expect that during a group session an interaction will take place in which the characteristics of purchasing behavior are discussed, but not an in which decisions are defined or made.
Part of the social fabric and its normal functioning is the existence of opinion leaders, followers and reserved people. That this variety of characters are seated at the table is perfectly normal, just as it is normal that their participation occurs with a different degree of intensity. This does not 'invalidate' a session; on the contrary, it enriches it.
And the most enriching thing about a group session is witnessing it. Live the eye-opening experience of learning about and raising awareness about what products and services mean to the public. For that experience to be truly harnessed, the observer group is required to subsequently discuss what happened during the session, come up with a consensus on the main findings, and bring them together in their own working summary. And this summary is not a substitute for the Investigator's Results Report.
The feeling of who leads and of whom a group session should be more one of disclosure of information than of verification of expected findings. If the latter is the case, the wrong technique is certainly being used.
