FACILITATION SUPPORT FOR ON-LINE FOCUS GROUP DISCUSSIONS BY MESSAGE FEATURE MAP

Face-to-face focus group discussion has been one of the reliable approaches for collecting variety of ideas and opinions for building marketing strategy, even though various network-based communication tools have been available. This is due to complications in facilitation of on-line discussions. The goal of this paper is to maximize the profit from on-line focus group discussions by supporting facilitators' task. In this paper, we propose a message feature map and two metrics for measuring message feature; centrality and novelty. The message feature map plots discussion messages on centrality-novelty plane, and gives us intuitive understanding of the discussions in various aspects. Reporting experimental results by using real data collected in on-line focus group discussions, we discuss how we can utilize the message feature map for the effective facilitation.