How to Make an FGD Successful.

Before arriving in Cambodia last year, I had never heard of a focus group discussion (or FGD). I don’t know how that happened. I have a university degree in a social science field. But I had never heard of a focus group which is mildly embarrassing. However, now I do and recently I attended my first focus group.

Here’s the story.

I do a lot of monitoring and evaluation in my job. One project was to evaluate a program which involved my partner helping their partner train commune council mediators in family mediation models. Mediation is surprisingly common in Cambodia. However, normally a respected “mediator” simply tells conflicting parties who was wrong and how to fix their problem…which doesn’t always fix problems or work towards attitude changes.

So these 12 mediators went through a six month course on listening, looking for feelings, maintaining neutrality, helping parties generate options, and when it’s appropriate to give advice.

I was part of the follow up team, conducting a focus group to understand how much they’d adapted the training content in their practice. We asked them to share stories, to share what they learned that was useful, what they wish the training had included, and what they might do differently in future mediations.

This involved driving three hours to Kampong Cham Province on a Monday morning. It involved sitting in a floor (knees together, the polite way) and listening to these delightful people tell their stories. It was in Khmer, but thankfully one of my colleagues with impeccable English was there to me. Afterwards, we ate fried rice and drove the three hours back to Phnom Penh.

We had several challenges. First, observers coming and going during the session (there should be no observers). Second, there was a tight time constraint (we ran out of time). Third, 12 people is really too many (should have had two groups). Finally, the space was long and narrow so people on one side of the room could not hear the other side. My team noted these as important considerations for future FGDs.

A unique challenge to Cambodia is that no one wants to make anyone else look bad, and no one wants to cause you to lose face. As a result, people will tell you what they think you want to hear. This is an added dynamic when people are in large groups, speaking about their experience working with your organization…they will tell you everything was great even if they loathed the very core of you existence. Knowing this, most the FGD involved posing scenarios and asked people how they would respond, “if your son was skipping school, what would you do?” Shifting attention away from yourself helps, but there is always a chance that the data isn’t accurate because people are only telling you want you want to hear.

In general, the FGD facilitator should,

• Paraphrasing to find key strengths
• Maintaining confidence and neutrality
• Ask open-ended unbiased questions
• Move the conversation along
• Encourage everyone to speak
• Help the group understand that no answer is correct, all ideas are valued

Part of my responsibility with this focus group is the analysis. Over December, I’ll be going through transcripts looking for trends, themes, and lessons learned, and understanding how we can improve our training to better meet needs for people like these Kampong Cham mediators.

A personal goal is to facilitate an FGD. It might not happen in Cambodia. In fact, it would be very rare for this to happen in Cambodia. But one day…such a nerdy little life goal…it’s on the bucket list.