It's The Lack Of Confrontation That's The Issue

There's a great commercial that was filmed in Toronto (I've used this focus group facility room many times) that skewers focus groups. Here's the YouTube link.

For those that may not know, Shreddies has launched a "New" "Diamond-Shaped" cereal. The humour around this, of course, is that there's nothing new about Diamond Shreddies - the diamonds are simply the same square Shreddies that have always been around, but they have been rotated 45 degrees. The ad's humour is that it makes such a big deal out of nothing.

Anyhow, back to the comments about focus groups, and even about projective techniques used in them. The commercial shows the moderator intently listening to and "soaking in" everything that participants say about the Diamond Shreddies - including answers to his "projective questions".

From a therapist's point of view, this passive and even "rah-rah" attitude fosters respondents and clients to produce a significant amount of Bullshit in their answers (which the commercial uses as it's main source of humour). They not only try to please the moderator/therapist, but they realize that once the moderator/therapist accepts their first BS response without challenging it, they will continue to feed BS to the moderator/therapist for the rest of the session/group. There are any number of reasons why a person will continue to feed BS to a moderator/therapist, and are beyond the scope of this article - but suffice it to say, once the BS-genie is out of the bottle, it is very hard to get back in. The important thing to note is that to put the "cork back in", we don't necessarily need to know WHY a person is feeding BS - we just need a quick way to stop it.

All of this leads to the issue of "confrontation" - when does a moderator or a therapist risk calling a client/participant on their BS responses, in an attempt to go deeper with the client/participant or get more honest responses. The therapeutic world makes a HUGE deal about this, and with good reason - people react differently to confrontation, and there are literally an infinite amount of ways of confronting a therapeutic client. The therapist needs to be very careful in confronting or the therapeutic relationship can suffer irreparable damage.

When it comes to confronting participants in focus groups, I think virtually all moderators have very little idea what they're doing. I think good moderators know how to confront when participants present BS on a "logical level". For example, when I conduct groups concerning Federal Budgets or Policies, it is easy to spot the BS when participants say something like "I want the government to lower taxes and spend more on health care." It's also easy to confront, by explaining the incompatibility of the choices identified, and getting participants to work through what they really want in this situation.

The above is kind of a gimme though. How do we get participants to cut through their BS when they feed "passionate" responses about liking or disliking a product/advertisement like they showed in this commercial? Typically, the moderator asks more questions or follows the discussion guide assuming that the questions are ordered such that each leads to a successively deeper insight from the participant. This rarely works, as it does not take into account HOW the respondent is avoiding in the "Here And Now" of the session. It assumes that the participant is "following the moderator" down the path to deeper discovery. If this is not happening, following the guide, or asking deeper questions does not work.

Unfortunately how to confront BS in a qualitative session cannot be explained quickly here. I think part of the issue is for moderators to recognize when BS occurs - and in my experience only about half can do this. The next part is how to actually confront. This takes therapists years to learn and do, and it could be argued that about 75% of all therapist training is how to confront successfully.

I remember one example where I noticed a participant's responses were getting increasingly "politically correct" and conforming more to "populist idea" about the brand and less about his own experiences. He was also becoming more resistant to projective questions. This participant then related a personal story about how he has such high demands of himself and his family. I then said to him "Has anyone ever called you a perfectionist?" With that one statement, he knew I had caught a hint of how he was avoiding showing his true feelings in the interview. While his initial responses to my remaining questions did not get more truthful, he became more engaged in projective questions that I asked him - and I was able to probe his opinions much more deeply.

In the end, many moderators know that we can't believe everything respondents tell us. However, it is up to us to know how to pull the truth out of participants. That trait, in my opinion, is how moderators should be judged.