Posted on 02/19/2014 at 06:19 PM
| Filed Under Blogs
Focus groups are usually a form of pilot testing and then more focus groups in larger numbers are done. You can mix it with surveys to have both quantitave (strictly numbers/set list of responses) and qualitative (more in-depth and personal responses) analyses. Samples in good research are representative of the population being studied, more is always better, and the results are extrapolated from there.
You can ask what's called a convenience sample, which is what you're talking about, where you just ask the easiest people to get, but most researchers try to get a large sample that jives with the makeup of the larger community they're trying to study. I.e. I'm never gonna get all of SFA to respond to a focus group request, but say a quarter each of the campus was a certain type of person. I'd have four people in my focus group who fit into each category for my pilot study, and try to find as many people as I could for focus groups from there that jive with the makeup of the community.
Not an exact science, but you can get some interesting results that are consistent with the greater population based on your sample groups.
Small, vocal minorities can affect content on a station if they're the only ones sending letters, but that's not really something research deals with; a good researcher in MCM would try to get a representative sample beyond a loud minority or throw stuff out if they can't find a good sample.