Focus Group

For our focus group we decided to choose a super hero film opening, The Avengers Age Of Ultron, to question the viewers on, because it displays a variety of different powers and genders. The questions were:-

- In three words, describe the scene you've just watched?

- What genre would you say that the movie is from?

- Have you seen clips like this before?, If so, where have you seen them and are they shown frequently in movies?

- Do you see any elements of different genres in this clip and what are they?

- Knowing that they're all super heroes, which one is your favourite and why?

- Which characters fit the stereotype of a hero the most?

Conclusion

From this, we learnt the positives and negatives with using focus groups. The positives are :-

• they are useful to obtain detailed information about personal and group feelings, perceptions and opinions
• they can save time and money compared to individual interviews
• they can provide a broader range of information
• they offer the opportunity to seek clarification
• they provide useful material eg quotes for public relations publication and presentations

....the negatives are :-

• there can be disagreements and irrelevant discussion which distract from the main focus 
• they can be hard to control and manage
• they can to tricky to analyse
• they can be difficult to encourage a range of people to participate
• some participants may find a focus group situation intimidating or off-putting; participants may feel under pressure to agree with the dominant view
• as they are self-selecting, they may not be representative of non-users.