Back in mid-July – with help from our MN contractor, Sheila – I led 6 of 12 hour-long telephone focus group discussions with ministers and elders from congregations in a central New Jersey presbytery (headquarters pictured above) that I’ll be leading in July and August. The focus groups were interesting in part because we were plunged a little into presbytery internal politics, as congregational leaders debated a previous presbytery decision to lay off two part-time presbytery staff people and call a new full-time associate executive presbyter who would support congregations and what kind of person should serve in this position.
For the second time that I’ve led these kinds of focus groups, Sheila – not me – will be taking the first cut at summarizing and analyzing the focus groups. Because half of these groups are with elders, who mostly have day jobs (like I do) and because the Presbyterian Center closes at 8 p.m. and costs $150 per hour to stay open later, I have ended up leading the groups with elders at night, between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., in the church office of our local church.
(During summer 2005 I did conduct individual one-on-one interviews on the phone from our home, when Vincent was home. But these were only tangentially related to my work, and I was talking with people all in Central time, and so Vincent was sometimes in bed. Plus I was only talking with one person. If I needed to stop to deal with any issue that had come up with Vincent, I could ask the person to wait just a minute – I can’t really do that when I’m leading a discussion with five or six people. Partly for the same reason that I have banned Vincent from my office (except for after hours), I believed the only way I could lead these focus groups at home (which one of my colleagues without children suggested) would be if I banned Stephanie and Vincent from our home – which – for 1 ½ hours three nights a week for two weeks – would be absurd.)
(I will be involved in a second and final week of this the first full week after I get back from Boston and Chicago, during the first week of school for Stephanie and Vincent.)
Carrying on these focus groups off-site has triggered some serious surprise technical and other difficulties. I always load everything I need for a set of focus groups into a small box, and take the box with me to whatever conference room (in the Presbyterian Center) in which I am leading the focus group (on the phone). (A couple of years ago I quit leading these focus groups on the phone in my office.) In principle, then, I should have everything I need. If not, I can always run back to my office to grab something, if I have a few minutes to spare. I typically call into these conference calls about 5 minutes early, and then Sheila calls in, and then the regular participants start calling, one or two early, one or two on time, and one or time a couple of minutes late. I also always use a small conventional audiocassette recorder to record the focus groups (a recorder our previous manager got me – identical to a recorder I bought in Galesburg, IL for my own research, which I still have – part of a series of recorders I’ve owned going back to my dissertation research – more recently, I’ve bought the equipment to tape phone calls – with the other person’s permission – directly). The tapes help me or the note taker (in this case, Sheila) if there’s something important that we can’t read in our notes or we want to use a direct quote in a report (note takers have occasionally gone back and played back all of the tapes, and transcribed them. Although I like detailed notes, I don’t like this, because it just takes too long: the person taking notes can end up taking four or five hours to take notes from one hour of focus groups, which is just too long.) Many people taking notes do so long hand (like I usually do when I have done this for myself) and then transcribe their notes on their computers (which I have to do immediately thereafter since otherwise I can’t read my notes).
The first focus group went fine, Monday night in the church office on the church phone with a speaker phone and with the tape recorder. But things seemed to unravel after that. Because I would be mailing the tapes to Sheila after the first week, Tuesday night (after leading a ministers’ group during the day from the Presbyterian Center) I pushed rewind on the recorder as I left the church office. This tape player is high end, but not so high end that it has an automatic shutoff. I put the tape recorder in the box and stupidly put it in the Taurus trunk, where it rewound all night – as the rain poured in the trunk that won’t shut when it’s 81 degrees or hotter outside (or when we forget to try to shut it after it cools down).
I’m not sure whether it was the 12 hours of rewinding or the rain pouring into the focus group box or both that damaged the tape recorder. But I noticed Tuesday morning that the recorder did not work. I tried during that morning’s focus group to use an older tape recorder, but it didn’t work. (Instead, I tried typing up a summary of mine. This wouldn’t help her extract direct quotes, but would give her another summary – which she might cross-check with her own notes.)
(I’m used to taking notes of my own one-on-one interviews. But, doing focus groups, I’ve gotten used to asking others to take notes. Recruiting people for focus groups and transcribing notes (which Sheila apparently isn’t doing one focus group at a time) are the two toughest parts of doing focus groups. In this case, I hadn’t had to do either of these. The organizational client – the members of the Associate Executive Presbyter search committee – have been making the recruiting calls. Developing the proposal and the script, moderating the focus groups, and writing a report are all important – and what I traditionally do (along with the recruiting), and they all take training, experience, and analytic skills. But they’re not as agonizing/tough as the recruiting and note transcription.)
So now I was out a tape recorder. The previous week Sheila had suggested we buy a digital recorder – a recorder that produces not an audiocassette player – but a computer audio file, that Sheila said I could e-mail to her. That day I did some research on digital and traditional tape recorders. My managers gave me conflicting advice. I ended up getting the $60 digital recorder that night at Radio Shack, where they showed me how to use it (15 minutes before the next focus group started) (digital recorder pictured below). (Ironically, it now appears that the original tape recorder is OK.)
It probably should have made me nervous that I was arriving so soon before the focus groups. This one worked OK. But the next morning I had scheduled a focus group in a conference room on the first floor, instead of in the usual 3rd floor conference room, which someone had beat me to. Here too things went wrong. The speaker phone on the more primitive phone in that conference room did not work. Even if it had worked, I still couldn’t have used my new digital recorder. The company building the $500 million arena across 2nd Street from the Presbyterian Center is going to be renting space on 1st floor east, and so they’re remodeling some (and that morning made a terrible racket). I could hear the folks on the phone, but the noise probably would have interfered with the sound on the recording too much. Of course, with no speaker, I didn’t try anyway. So once again I had to type notes.
Everything went OK the next morning (we took Wednesday evening off because many elders (including me that night) have church events Wednesday evening). But Thursday evening I faced the mother of all technical etc. problems. Once again, I waited until awfully late (I had gotten home to take Vincent to martial arts class) to leave for the church office. As I started to get into the car, however, I realized that the all-important box with the recorder, my script and information about participants who had signed up, and the call-in information I had left at work. I thought about trying to race back to work. But there was no time. I went back in the house to glance for the box and assess my options. I probably should have either stayed and done the focus group from there or just hopped in the car, since I wasted a few crucial minutes. I also, it turns out, didn’t have my cell phone, which I came to regret. That means that I wasn’t able to call Stephanie. I wished I could have called Stephanie to get into my work e-mail from our home computer and find an e-mail message with the call-in information.
As it was, when I walked into the church office, the clock said after 7:35 p.m. (already five minutes late – I don’t think I’ve ever set up a focus group late – at worst, I’ve called in at exactly the appointed time.) I first took the time to call Stephanie and ask her to start up the home computer in order to get into my e-mail. (In some e-mail message a ways back would be the phone number and ID number I needed to dial.) Then, I thought very hard, tried to plumb the depths of my poor memory, and fished out a 10-digit toll-free number, a 7-digit ID number, and a 4-digit moderator number, tried all three numbers, and prayed. Amazingly, after a series of clicks, Sheila and five focus group participants were on the line. They had not been able to talk with each other or with Sheila (or Sheila with them) until I had signed on as moderator. Six people were on the line, and they had waited for as long as 10 minutes for me. I was so happy that they were all still there and that Sheila hadn’t had a heart attack.
I had purposely skipped calling people before leaving work earlier in the day to remind them about the focus group, however, because I don’t like phone focus groups with that many people (the eight people who had signed up), and so I suspect not all eight had called in. But I couldn’t be sure whether at least a couple had called in who had then given up after no one seemed to be there (Eventually, I figured no one had hung up, because no one complained directly to me or to the client about no one being there and I did get an e-mail from one of the three no-shows saying he had gotten busy and wouldn't be able to call in at all.)
Still, as I sat there breathlessly on the phone with Sheila and the five, I wasn’t out of the woods. I didn’t have my list of participants or my list of questions (all in the box). Following the man who trained me, I usually ask people to introduce themselves (partly telling us what name they want us to call them during the focus group) and – since we can’t literally go around the room (since we’re not in a room), I ask them to introduce themselves by where they live (and – usually - I have a list of people slated to participate with addresses). This time I just had to ask them to pipe in with their names since I had no list. I quickly started to jot notes down about the questions I remembered. I have a basic spiel that goes on for almost five minutes that explains something about the subject of the focus group and then gives instructions (with no opportunities for questions) – I just fill in different information about the specific focus group. I practice this whole thing from memory when I’m walking the dog or driving the car during the week or two before the focus groups (so I don’t sound like I’m reading). But this time I didn’t do as much with the later questions. I allow myself to peek at the list during the focus groups or as I start reciting them. But there would be no such peeking this time.
Everything worked out OK. During the final three of the six focus groups the discussion really got going and I probably should have reined it in just a little. Sheila has asked me to try harder to get question #5 about preferences for the AEP’s training and experience. It was actually the Tuesday night focus group in which I let them talk more than the promised hour and the phone system actually cut us off about 65 minutes into the call ??) and a few of us called back and talked for a few minutes (I’d never let a focus group go on that long and should not do so).
Once again, I did not have a recording, because the digital recorder was back in the box in my office. Sheila and I ended up talking until about 9:15 and then I eventually got to typing up my notes – still sitting in the church office – starting at 10:30 p.m. (which made for a late night – including typing up some blog entries – at church.)
I faced one more technical problem. A colleague mailed the two tapes to Sheila. But the next Monday when I downloaded the digital recorder software and tried to e-mail Sheila the two audio files, it turns out they were way too big to e-mail. Sheila had been confident that would be a problem, but one of my managers hadn’t been so sure. It turns out that you can set the digital recorder at different sound qualities (as with VCRs) and the audio files that this produces take up a lot more space if you pick high quality, as I had done. What I may want to try next Monday night is to set the recorder at low quality (one of three settings) and then stop the recording every 15 minutes and go to a new recording (so I’ll have four 15-minute low-quality recordings). Hopefully, that will work.
Sheila and I talked Tuesday – the day after Vincent left for Ohio with his father, a few hours before I left for Chicago and Boston – to review what we thought had come out of the focus groups so far and talk about some logistic issues. During the tail end of my trip I may start jotting down some possible questions for the survey that is supposed to follow up/come out of the focus groups, which will start up again Monday (hopefully without all the glitches that have plagued us so far).
But whatever happens over the next week on this and many other projects (for work and otherwise) – I don’t expect it to be as stressful for me as the summer of technical problems has been, especially that Thursday evening without my box.
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