Focus Group Experience and Responses
After reflecting on new ways to recruit participants to engage with a focus group, I abandoned the blanket email approach and instead decided to ask students in person whilst on a year group field trip to Dungeness. As students had formed small groups and were in a relaxed setting, it felt much more personable to approach students and take names of those willing to speak to me. This proved vastly more successful than my email and I gathered about 14 names. It also proved insightful to speak to the students in person, as it revealed reasons why my first attempt fell flat. For example, I originally organised the group on a Wednesday, but as this is a non-teaching day at UAL, many students work elsewhere that day and are rarely on site. They also mentioned that it takes a long time for some of them to travel to Camberwell, so weren’t prepared to come in for a 30 minute chat. It was also encouraging to receive genuine advice from the students, and hear their suggestions on how to successfully organise students to speak to me in a focus group. They suggested times that they were on site but between sessions, such as our Monday critical practice talks, which would be an effective day for students to speak to me as, in their words ‘ they had nothing better to do’!
To further help attendance by students, I followed up any interested students with a personalised email (Kreuger, Casey, 2021) to remind them of their interest in the focus group and invite them to the session. The focus group was held in the canteen (at the students request) and snacks were provided to help make the meeting seem more relaxed and comfortable.
For my focus group, I wanted to use a semi structured interview style with open ended questions so that I could explore topics in depth in an organic way. I compiled a list of questions that you can see here.
I gathered consent and gave each participant an information sheet at the start of the session, and made an audio recording whilst writing my own notes. The main responses have been transcribed and categorised by question. They can be seen below or here.
Reflection
This was the first focus group I have run, and I think there are a lot of things I could to do to improve my technique. I found it hard to stick to the questions and and I felt compelled to listen and respond to student’s feedback which at times strayed away from the focus of the meeting. For example, many students used this as an opportunity to voice complaints about the course and particularly mentioned needs related to neurodiversity that was important to hold space for and listen to. In this way, I found the students responses extremely helpful for other aspects of my teaching and the course in general, so I aim to take this feedback to our programme director to act on this in positive way.
When on track, I found that I gathered meaningful and insightful responses related to my role, progression and how to make students feel more comfortable attending these sessions in the studio. It was also an opportunity to personally connect with the students in an informal setting which I hope will be more beneficial to their learning. I aim to take my insights from their responses to my fellow transition tutor colleagues in our next meeting to plan together our support for progression throughout all three years.