With the increasing attention on community participation across all spheres of government, community consultation strategies and devotion of programs to the community, public sector officers and managers increasingly need to identify issues and gather information from a range of stakeholders. This workshop aims to equip public sector officers with the skills to recruit, select and conduct focus groups in a variety of settings including workplace situations, ongoing advisory committees and community consultation work. The workshop will provide planning processes, questioning skills, moderating skills as well as strategies for analysing and reporting the results from conducting focus groups.
Key issues for this discussion include:
Characteristics, uses and styles of focus groups
Techniques for planning a focus group
Frameworks for developing questioning skills
Recruitment and selection processes
Moderating attributes and skills
Analysing and reporting structures
Techniques for adapting and modifying focus groups
Methodology:
Facilitators will lead discussion providing key concepts, outlining relevant issues and providing core information for participants to discuss and analyse. The approach is interactive with role-play and participative processes in use.
This workshop equips participants to:
Identify the characteristics of focus groups
Describe the uses and styles of focus groups
Explain the planning process of focus groups
Schedule the questioning route for focus groups
Identify the attributes necessary to moderate focus groups
Discuss the essential skills needed to moderate focus groups
Analyse and report the results from using focus groups
