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Using staff focus groups in the redevelopment of a library web site deploys their knowledge of user navigation issues and search strategies and addresses the unique needs of library staff. This paper seeks to describe the process of planning, recruiting, and conducting staff focus groups and provide a discussion of lessons learned.

A committee of professionals and non‐professionals from the University of Calgary Library conducted a series of five focus groups with library staff. The goals were to determine their content and service priorities for the redesigned library web site, and also to ensure that staff was included in the redesign process.

This paper makes recommendations for library staff focus group interviewing, including planning, formulating questions, recruitment, conducting sessions, and analysis and reporting.

Focus group interviews can be effectively conducted in‐house, with careful planning and adherence to established guidelines. Focus groups are a very useful method for gathering staff input for web site redesign or any other library‐planning project.

This paper will be useful to librarians interested in assessing staff needs and priorities through focus group interviews. The paper fills a void in the library literature regarding the use of library staff as both focus group leaders and participants.

This paper seeks to highlight the current confusion in the terminology for group research, identify the geographic, historical and scientific sources of this confusion and suggest a reduction in the number of terms used to two, thereby offering a definition on which researchers from different cultural backgrounds and scientific traditions may be able to agree.

A review of the academic and practitioner literature on qualitative group research in academic, social and market research indicates that various terms for groups are used interchangeably and are often assumed to have the same meaning. These terms include; Focus Group, Group Discussion, Group Interview, Group, Focus Group Interview, Focus Group Discussion, Qualitative Group Discussion and Nominal Group Interview.

The contribution of this paper is that it offers a resolution of this issue and so allows researchers from across geographic borders, different scientific traditions and from both academic and practitioner backgrounds to talk to one another in a common language.

This issue of differences in terminology for groups has largely been ignored by researchers and this paper hopes to bring some clarity and understanding of the key differences between focus group interviews and focus group discussions.

Considers the focus group as an alternative to the traditional structured questionnaire. Their appeal, what they can and cannot achieve, and four key questions related to conducting focus groups are discussed. Focus groups are relevant to a broad spectrum of marketing issues related to the food industry, and it is concluded that their role will continue to dominate qualitative market research. Increasingly high standards will be demanded of moderators, perhaps leading to recognised qualifications for the holding of focus groups.

This paper aims to explore the benefits of using faculty focus groups as an early component of a scholarly communications program with suggestions for planning and conducting sessions, recruiting participants and analyzing outcomes.

The paper is based on the authors' use of focus groups in the initial stages of organizing a scholarly communications program at Kansas State University.

The paper finds that focus groups are an effective method to begin identifying scholarly communication issues that resonate with faculty on a particular campus. Focus groups can be helpful in targeting efforts to begin a scholarly communications program.

Focus groups are effective in generating insights, opinions and attitudes and are low cost in terms of time and resource commitments.

There is very little in the literature about using faculty focus groups to start a campus scholarly communication program. This paper provides practical and useful information that other libraries can use to incorporate this method into their planning.

Focus groups are an effective strategy in consumer research if conducted properly. Too often the meaning and origin of focus groups have been distorted by marketing and consumer researchers and the validity of retrieved data is questioned. By looking at the definition and evolution of focus groups, definitive advantages and disadvantages of the method emerge. Focus groups provide the collective insight of group dynamics while preserving individual preferences. If focus groups are contrived using true qualitative characteristics, this method may yield the strongest data for use by consumer and marketing researchers in truly identifying with customers today.

This paper aims to test the idea generation capabilities of online text-based focus groups as compared to the traditional in-person focus groups using sustainability in the hospitality industry as the idea generation topic. Idea generation quantity and quality are analyzed and the theoretical and practical implications for the hospitality industry are discussed.

An experimental study tested the quality of ideas generated by online versus in-person focus groups. Participants were purposively sampled from the hospitality program at a large southeastern United States university and randomly assigned into one of two treatment groups: online text-based or traditional in-person focus groups. During both treatment groups participants generated ideas focused on sustainability in the hospitality industry.

The online focus group generated a comparable quantity of ideas, in addition to a similar average quality of ideas and number of good ideas.

The generation of ideas and the selection of opportunities drive the innovation process through which firms can strengthen their competitive advantage and maintain and grow market share and profitability. The results of this study may assist hospitality firms in determining which form of qualitative research delivers the highest return on investment by generating the best ideas at the lowest cost.

This paper breaks new ground by assessing the effectiveness of idea generation in online versus traditional focus groups, comparing both the quantity and quality of ideas generated from an experimental study that uses random assignment.

Focus group interviewing, an important social science research methodology dating to the 1920s, is currently experiencing renewed popularity worldwide. This paper aims to review the implementation of this qualitative assessment tool as it relates to the library environment. The article is designed to stimulate the use of focus groups in librarianship and to demonstrate the range of positive applications across various activities within this field, such as administration, cataloging, reference, internet, and other areas. The goal is to bolster recognition that this data‐gathering technique can be utilized to achieve a variety of goals.

A comprehensive search of online databases was conducted in library science and in numerous other social sciences, given the interdisciplinary nature of the topic. The salient monographic and journal literature was selected and annotated. A number of standard handbooks, textbooks, references sources, and scholarly articles were consulted to provide the background information found in the introductory essay.

The paper finds focus group interviewing can be successfully employed in a wide range of endeavors within librarianship. Relative to the other social sciences, to date libraries have underutilized the approach.

This research may be useful for librarians, library administrators, and others who are involved in planning and conducting a focus group project in order to appraise the quality of library programs, services, and policies. No other article provides this level of in‐depth review and evaluation through copiously annotated entries covering the spectrum of use throughout the library literature.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the current state of political and administrative ethnography in political science and public administration before suggesting that focus groups are a useful tool in the study of governing elites. They provide an alternative way of “being there” when the rules about secrecy and access prevent participant observation. Briefly, it describes the job of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff before explaining the research design, the preparations for the focus group sessions, and the strategies used to manage the dynamics of a diverse group that included former political enemies and factional rivals.

It outlines the approach to analysis and interpretation before reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of focus groups for research into political and administrative elites.

It concludes that focus groups are a valuable tool for making tacit knowledge explicit, especially when all participants work in a shared governmental tradition.

It is the first project to use focus groups to study the political elites of Westminster systems, let alone Australian government.

This paper seeks to describe how the results of the qualitative research method of focus groups may be used as conceptual data at the onset of a research study to inform researchers regarding relevant issues for future more in‐depth quantitative study.

Seven focus group sessions with a total of 50 participants were conducted, each focus group with six to eight participants. All focus groups included the homogeneous participants of new entrants to the hospitality industry. Focus group questions were inductive and naturalistic and centered on career expectations and work‐life issues. Sessions averaged 1 hour and 15 minutes and were conducted by trained graduate students.

The paper suggests that long, unpredictable hours create both work‐related and non‐work stress. Further, there is general agreement regarding the stressors and benefits associated with working in the hospitality industry.

Limitations include the use of senior, hospitality management majors, all of whom had hospitality industry employment experience, but some of whom had fewer than 1,000 hours of such experience.

This work illustrates how focus groups may fit into a larger research study involving the hospitality industry. This work also explores the common issue, but understudied topic of work‐life balance in the hotel industry. In so doing, it provides greater understanding of the issue to researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to establish whether consumer focus groups can generate reliable data when used as a consumer research input to copy/graphic design development for retail food packaging.

Six focus groups of six consumers each (n=36) were used to assess four concept designs for a manuka honey cordial product. The focus groups were used to rank the design concepts and to generate specific consumer-driven recommendations to develop/improve each of the designs. A new version of each design was then developed using these recommendations. The eight designs (four original and four improved) were tested together, using a quantitative field experiment at a supermarket in the area from which the focus group sample was drawn.

The results showed that the focus group rankings of the four original designs were largely predictive of the outcomes of the field trial. The improved designs also consistently outperformed their original equivalents in the field trials. Very large improvements were recorded with respect to the weaker original designs.

The research only studied a single product type. However, the results demonstrate that focus group outcomes can be extended onto larger populations if the focus group sample is large enough.

These results support the use of consumer focus groups as a research input to package graphic design development.

Focus groups are used regularly in research where the applicability of their results to larger populations is assumed. This is the first research to formally test that assumption.