ABSTRACT
As early as the 1930s, social scientists expressed concern about the interview as a data collection technique. Interviews were judged to be overly dominated by the questioner, and criticized as not leading to the true feelings of the respondents. Various approaches were attempted in response to this criticism, leading to such innovations as Carl Rogers’ non-directive therapy, and later, invention of the Tgroup. Another approach that built on participant’s feelings became known as the Focus Group. Since the 1960s, the technique has been adopted by market researchers who use it to determine what consumers think of products, or potential products. In the last two decades, social scientists, evaluators, planners and educators have also discovered the technique and are now using focus groups to collect data on a wide variety of issues and topics.
