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Long
Answer:
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THE HISTORY
OF FOCUS GROUPS
Focus groups can be
traced back to one man, Robert Merton. Merton is in fact
considered the father of focus groups (Stewart and
Shamdasani 1990, 9). The first focus group took place at
the Office of Radio Research at Columbia University in
1941. Paul Lazarsfeld asked Robert Merton to help him
tabulate audience responses to radio shows. In
Lazarsfeld's original experiment, the audience pressed
different colored buttons to indicate when they had
either a positive or negative response to a radio show.
Merton added depth to this process in that at the end of
the radio show, audience members (as a group) were asked
why they responded positively or negatively at
particular moments in the show. In this context, the
first focus group was conducted (Stewart and Shamdasani
1990, 9).
Merton's idea to ask the
audience to describe their responses to questions came
out of a new line of thinking that had started to
develop during the 1930's. At that time, researchers
began to pursue the idea that closed questions did not
always provide the most accurate responses. Research
results could be unintentionally influenced through
oversight or omission in the question construction. It
was thought that the interview itself might encapsulate
the interviewer's preconceived ideas because the
interviewer was the "leader" of the interview.
The interviewee was limited to answering in a way that
was largely controlled by both the interviewer and the
closed questions. To help address this perceived
problem, researchers began to explore techniques in
which the researcher had a less dominant role and where
the questions asked were nondirective (Krueger and Casey
2000, 5-6).
Merton began to work with
non-directive group interview techniques and soon found
that people were most revealing when they found
themselves in a safe, comfortable place with individuals
like themselves. Merton thus began to employ this
technique; first with the radio show but later in other
media related instances (e.g. army training videos)
(Krueger and Casey 2000, 6). However, despite the fact
that Merton was a leader in his field, focus groups were
not widely used in academic research until the 1980's.
Until the 1980's, focus groups were largely used in
market research. There are now four main arenas in which
focus groups are used: market research,
academic/scientific research, nonprofit research, and
participatory research (Krueger and Casey 2000, 7).
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