ABSTRACT
Anyone who has watched a couple of episodes of Mad Men will have a sense of how focus groups work. In real life, the input of a focus group of representative people is taken very seriously as a way to inform decisions around policies and other matters. Focus groups are useful in cases where the researcher would like to develop a single or specific recommendation or insight representing or bridging a range of views. There is a wide range of options for creating data from focus groups. The simplest and possibly least effective is for the researcher to make field notes as the conversation proceeds. When composing focus groups, it is useful, for most purposes, to have a range of people with different perspectives and experiences, but this is not always possible. A focus group made up of people in teaching roles could help with ideas for how best to communicate the desire for those characteristics to the teaching workforce.
