Mastering Focus Groups and Depth Interviews: A Practitioner's Guide

Tips that will Make You a Better Moderator and Interviewer

In this practical handbook, author Roger Straus shares insights, tips, and wisdom acquired from his decades-spanning career as a moderator and depth interviewer. You'll find practical tips for responding to an RFP (including budget considerations that are not always obvious), planning a depth-research project, working with research facilities, conducting the research, and conveying your findings to your clients.

Focusing on six applications for depth methods, Straus explains that focus groups and depth interviews can be used for much more than preliminary research and ideation exercises. He takes you through the Five-Question process for planning a group, addressing Who?, How Many?, Where? When?, and How?. In addition to discussing each of these critical questions, he offers scores of useful best-practice tips that you can put to use immediately.

You'll also find valuable advice for integrating qualitative and quantitative research and for choosing the best approach to your research project, with extensive discussion points weighing the benefits of in-person groups and interviews vs. on-line, synchronous and asynchronous methods.

Recommended for professionals in market research, product development, government, sociological practice and public policy research, especially for those who might be new to the discipline.

Roger A. Straus, Ph.D. has over twenty-five years of experience as a marketing researcher and sociological practitioner. A Certified Clinical Sociologist, he currently divides his time between his role as a Vice President with the Blackstone Group, Inc. and his independent consulting practice. He previously served as a research executive with such leading custom research houses as GfK, TVG, Opinion Research Corporation, and National Analysts Division of Booz Allen Hamilton.

In addition to countless focus groups, depth interviews and other qualitative studies, Dr. Straus has been responsible for a large number of quantitative surveys, typically involving advanced analytics. He has provided domestic and global research to a wide range of clients from Fortune 100 companies across industry verticals to universities, professional associations and start-ups. Dr. Straus has also served as head of Market Insight for ZymoGenetics, now a Division of Bristol Myers Squibb.

Growing up in Great Neck, NY, he attended Antioch College in Ohio and the New School for Social Research in New York City, then moved to the West Coast. After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, with a specialization in qualitative methodology, Dr. Straus decided to apply social science to solving real-world problems. He co-founded what is now the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology, and remains an internationally recognized leader in the emerging field of sociological practice. He has published many articles on marketing research and social science, two textbooks on sociological practice, and a number of books for clinicians and the general public, one of which has been a bestseller. He has taught at the University of California, Alfred University, the MBA program at Maryhurst University, and elsewhere.

After many years in the Philadelphia area, he moved to Portland, Oregon in 2006. Just to keep things interesting, he assists his wife with her independent music labels focusing on good-time Americana music. Currently mammal-free, they live with a number of koi, tropical fish, and an extremely personable box turtle.