Exploring the atmosphere created by focus group interviews: Comparing consumers' feelings across qualitative techniques

This paper reports the results of an empirical study that examined focus group participants' perceptions of the atmosphere in focus group interviews. The feelings focus group participants expressed about the interview were compared with participants in the nominal group technique and respondents to a self-administered open-ended survey. The results from this experiment indicate that the atmosphere created by each of these techniques differs. Focus group participants perceived the interview as more exciting and arousing than participants in the other two techniques. We conclude that the atmosphere in focus groups is better suited to some specific types of qualitative research tasks and less suited for others.