Focus groups as a knowledge elicitation technique: an exploratory study

The authors examine whether one technique for group knowledge elicitation, focus groups, can provide different thoughts and judgments about a problem than individual interviews. The experimental situation was based on the resolution of an ill-structured problem by experienced subjects in a field setting. Videotaped scenarios were used to describe the situation for knowledge acquisition. Ten subjects were used, five for individual interviews and five for the focus groups. It was found that focus groups performed better in generating original responses than individual interviews and that focus groups were at least as good as individual interviews in terms of the quality and acceptability of ideas