Technical communicators use focus groups to understand the issues and needs of audiences, users, and customers. But if you don’t fully understand the purpose, design, and use of focus groups, the information you get from them may not be everything you want.
Join George Hayhoe and James Conklin on Wednesday, 20 October from 1:00-2:00 PM EDT (GMT-4) for the Live Web Seminar, Using Focus Groups to Strengthen Technical Communication Practice. This highly interactive workshop reviews the theory and practice of focus group methods and shows how technical communicators can best use them. The workshop includes:
- Theory review: Definitions, background, most common uses of focus group methods
- Designing focus groups: Illustration of design process, followed by experiential activity
- Capturing data in focus groups: recording, video, making notes on a computer, flipcharts
- Organizing and analyzing data: theming exercise, using some sample data
- Feeding data back to focus group participants
You’ll interact with the instructors and fellow attendees, too, with question-writing exercises, brainstorming how to code data, and a demonstration of the member-checking process. Increase your ability to create a coherent and useful design, and learn how to capture, organize, analyze, and apply focus group data to your needs.