Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Friends Or Strangers? A Feasibility Study Of An Innovative Focus Group Methodology, Chandria D. Jones, Jocelyn Newsome, Kerry Levin, Amanda Wilmot, Jennifer Anderson Mcnulty, Teresa Kline

The Qualitative Report

Focus groups are useful tools for examining perceptions, feelings, and suggestions about topics, products, or issues. Typically, focus groups are held in formal facilities with “strangers” or participants who do not know each other. Recent work suggests that “friendship groups” may provide an innovative alternative for collecting group-level qualitative data. This approach involves recruiting a single “source participant” who hosts a group in his/her home and recruits friends possessing the characteristics desired for the study. In order to examine the feasibility of friendship groups as a defensible research methodology, we conducted a series of four friendship groups as a feasibility …