"A form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging."
Basically we need to collect deeper information from the school kids. It was not easy as I thought it would be. Each team gets 12-13 students. Our group had 12 students for our focus group. Some of them are quite talkative and some were quite shy. We started by introducing our objective of the day and be friendly to them. This helps them to be more comfortable to give their opinions.
Our focus group research tools contain 3 different categories which are eating patterns, Symbolic studies and also purchasing behavior. First of all we started by asking them their eating patterns. This category of questions give us information on how they like to consume their foods, whether they prefer using hands or cutlery while eating, and most important was what they love to eat. By knowing these information we get some hints on how to create our product based on what they like.
Second category was symbolic studies. This study is related more on their feeling toward the food they eat, their experience on canteen foods, and what they think of canteen foods. Basically the information that we gained from this study help us to understand their thoughts of canteen food and also their expectation what canteen food should be. Luckily, our group managed to get a very enthusiastic group of students. I am glad that they willing to share their thoughts with us.
Finally, we asked them on the purchasing behavior. We mostly asked them on ideas of packaging, whether they accept food innovations, and also their acceptable expenditure on foods. We get a lot of different answers from each students which also give us a quite hard time on recording the data.
We need to listen to each students opinion and tabulate their opinion word by word based on the questions and categories. By doing this, it helps us to see repeating points or important points that we wanted. It took us almost 3 days to finish on listening to the recording nd also watching the videos. Not only listening to opinions, we need to look at expressions when the questions were being asked as well. By looking at their body language we managed to observed whether the students are interested or not, or get some hints of their feelings when they answer the questions.
Finally we need to present our data on this coming monday. Hopefully, we managed to present our data well and get less comment from Ms.Chong this time :p
Cheers!
Shuhada Zuki
