Focus Group Quotes & Sayings

Focus group research has created a composite No-Man who resembles no-one anyone has ever met. — Cathy Lewis

Adam Gottbetter defines focus groups as being a form of group interview where is capitalized the communication between research participants. This is conducted in order to generate data. Although group interviews are often used simply as a quick and convenient way to collect data from several people simultaneously, Adam Gottbetter explains why focus groups explicitly use group interaction as part of the method. According to Adam Gottbetter this means that instead of the researcher asking each person to respond to a question in turn, people are encouraged to talk to one another. This talk consists of asking questions, exchanging anecdotes and commenting on each other's experiences and points of view. — Adam Gottbetter

Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?"
Glisan bristled. "Yes."
"What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a maturities schedule!"
But they didn't. With all the focus on deals and earnings- with finance group's transformation into a profit center rather than a division to support the business- the workday, boring details had been sloughed off.
p. 560 — Kurt Eichenwald

In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone. The lesson wasn't that sports couldn't coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education. — Amanda Ripley

Through "deprogramming" or cult intervention the only issues that are addressed focus upon the specific group and group involvement. The subject of such an intervention subsequently may leave the group and go on with their life reassuming their own basic individual values and beliefs. — Rick Ross

CALLING VERSUS TEXTING "A phone call? The WORST." - FEMALE FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT "If you want to talk to me, you're going to have to call me." - ANOTHER FEMALE FOCUS GROUP PARTICIPANT [Dumbfounded] - EVERY GUY IN THAT FOCUS GROUP — Aziz Ansari

that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation - kids on the left, parents on the right - a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents' side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids' side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them. — Aziz Ansari

Focus group methods by Adam Gottbetter are find their way into and are widely used to examine people's experiences of disease and of health services. — Adam Gottbetter

If you have ever sat in a focus group in a swing state, you are 100% certain that most soft partisans make up their minds on who to vote for based on things that are totally outside of an understanding of issues. — Christopher Michael Cillizza

A joke is either funny or it's not funny. If I hear a funny joke, you know what I do? I laugh, that's what I do. I don't start a focus group to see who got hurt by the joke. — Alonzo Bodden

In my cranky old age, I actually prefer recording alone now, on 'The Simpsons,' for example, because I find that the director can just focus on what I'm doing and I can do a lot of variations. A lot of times, when I record with a group, I'll stay after class for another hour or two. — Hank Azaria

When Sony was introducing the boom box, the company gathered a group of potential customers and held a focus group on what colour the new product should be: black or yellow. After some discussion among the group of likely buyers, everyone agreed that consumers would better respond to yellow. After the session, the facilitator thanked the group, and then mentioned that, as a bonus, they were welcome to take a free boom box on the way out. There were two piles of boom boxes: yellow and black. Every person took a black boom box.'5 Clearly what people say isn't always a true reflection of what they think, so we need a way of getting into these shadowy issues and seeing how they affect the customer's goals. — Matt Watkinson

The main focus of this group is to help bridge the gifts and abilities of the pastor (and other staff) and laity in the church. Building the bridges that will link the faithfulness of the past with the possibilities of the future is crucial. — General Board Of Discipleship

Symbolic interactionists stress that to understand poverty we must focus on what
poverty means to people. When people evaluate where they are in life, they compare
themselves with others. In some rural areas, simple marginal living is the norm, and
people living in these circumstances don't feel poor. But in Leslie's cosmopolitan circle,
people can feel deprived if they cannot afford the latest upscale designer clothing from
their favorite boutique. The meaning of poverty, then, is relative: What poverty is differs
from group to group within the same society, as well as from culture to culture and from
one era to the next. — James M. Henslin

I think Canadians are tired of politicians that are spun and scripted within an inch of their life, people who are too afraid of what a focus group might say about one comment or a political opponent might try to twist out of context, to actually say much of anything at all. — Justin Trudeau

A new world of complex relationships and feelings opens up when the peer group takes its place alongside the family as the emotional focus of the child's life. Early peer relationships contribute significantly to the child's ability to participate in a group (and in that sense, society), deal with competition and disappointment, enjoy the intimacy of friendships, and intuitively understand social relationships as they play out at school, in the neighborhood, and later in the workplace and adult family. — Stanley Greenspan

Of course, we wore silly outfits, the pictures were corny, and some people still focus on that. But ABBA wasn't a big intellectual thing. We were a pop group. — Bjorn Ulvaeus

Adam Gottbetter's method of focus group is particularly useful for exploring people's knowledge and experiences and thus can be used to examine not only what people think but how and why they think in that way. — Adam Gottbetter

At one point during a focus group with older women, I asked them straight out whether a lot of women their age got married just to get out of the house. Every single woman there nodded. — Aziz Ansari

he attended a Buddhist retreat in the north of England at which the principal teachers were a small group of Buddhist nuns. He no longer remembers any details about the tradition they belonged to, but he remembers well the profound effect their teachings had on him. At the core of the retreat were instructions on how participants could develop a practice of meditation through using the breath as a focus to remain anchored in the present moment. "What the nuns pointed me to was the part of their tradition kept alive through monastic practice for 2,500 years," he says. "This was the importance of staying in the present moment, the importance of calm abiding, the practice of concentration in Buddhism known as samatha." This time spent in the company of nuns, listening to their guidance, was "a seminal moment. — Christine Toomey

Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called " The Top 100." They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you would bring if you could take only a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to your next company. At the end of each retreat, Jobs would stand in front of the whiteboard( he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, " What are ten things we should be doing next?" People would fight to their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down, and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of ten.Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, " We can only do three. — Walter Isaacson

Baseball is a game that shouts, 'Slow Down' to America. Stop tweeting, texting, blogging, watching cable news, and obsessing about polls, lost planes, and focus-group-driven politicians. — Mike Barnicle

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet. — Joe Eszterhas

On the light side everyone thinks they are the most important, that their own understandings, or their group's understandings, are the key. There's a diversity of cultures and opinions, so there is competition, diffusion, and no single focus. — Carlos Barrios

The James Bond movies and the comic books had it all wrong. You did not need elaborate contraptions, complicated plans, and futuristic doomsday weapons to wipe out of all of humankind. All you needed was a fully realized vision and an intense focus. All you needed to do is give a little push to what was already happening; what was inevitable.
All you had to do is get one group of people who believe in an invisible man in the sky to get really pissed off at another group of people who believe in a slightly different version of the same invisible man in the sky. — James J. Caterino

The main focus of Burroughs' Wild Boys tetralogy is an apocalyptic world in which the social order is disrupted enough to allow gay men the possibility of forming seperate communities. The eponymous characters of The Wild Boys band together in the deserts of North Africa to create an alternative to heterosexual society and simultaneously wage war on an intolerant, heterosexual social order that refuses them independence. Burroughs repeatedly links the boys with the youth movements of the late 1960's. He cites Genet's belief that 'it is time for writers to support the rebellion of youth not only with their words but with their presence as well.' The Wild Boys can thus be read as a progression from the riots of Chicago and Stonewall in that they are a radical group of youthful, queer, multiracial revolutionaries who echo Burroughs' own belief that non-violent action is not enough. — Jamie Russell

To know John Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word. He understood that courage is not something to be gauged in a poll or located in a focus group. No adviser can spin it. No historian can backdate it. For, in the age old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity's approval. — Gerald R. Ford

I was among the first elected officials in the country to endorse gay marriage. The political wise guys said I was taking a big chance: Boston is a heavily Catholic city. So I conducted a focus group with Frankie, a neighbor who runs a garage: ME: What do you think about this same-sex marriage? FRANKIE: If they want to be miserable, let 'em do it. I knew I was safe after that. — Thomas M. Menino

Maybe it's just my improv and sketch background, but I'm a lot more comfortable in a group. I like sharing focus and populating an ensemble. — Jason Mantzoukas

Dedicating Time and Resources With thousands, even millions within the people group of your focus, where do you commit your time? Detach from the idea that every need is a call. Pray that God would connect you to "people of peace" (Luke 10:6). — Robert S. Miller

I feel passionately about issues, and I don't hide my emotions from people. I am not a focus group-tested, blow-dried candidate or governor. Now that has always made some people, you know, uneasy. Some people like that style, some people don't ... But I am not a bully. — Chris Christie

It is so inspiring to see a new group coming together not to focus on a particular war or weapons system, but on all war-everywhere. And it's great to have such beautifully crafted arguments about why war is not inevitable and how war contributes to so many other global ills. This coalition is worthy of Martin Luther King's call to end violence and instead put our energies and resources into 'life-affirming activities.' Bravo! — Medea Benjamin

If you've got somebody in harm's way, you want the president being
making advice, not
be given advice by the military, and not making decisions based upon the latest Gallup poll or focus group. — George W. Bush

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women ... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women. — Bell Hooks

In terms of technological progress,
the public is slower than focus group. — Toba Beta

I don't really think of these as projects. I think of them as bands. I have tried to not just convene a group of musicians and make one record or make one gig and just drop it. Each of them develop over time. I have been really fortunate to keep a band like the Sextet together over three very different albums. Each time, the goal got more deep for me in terms of how I wanted to write for those people. So it is really about trying to develop ideas and trying to have a consistent focus on a way to come up with new ideas in music that I want to do. — Dave Douglas

That's what terrorism is, basically - pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together. — Dorothy Gilman

I don't hide my emotions from people. I am not a focus-group tested, blow- dried candidate or governor. — Chris Christie

My saddest decision in football was leaving Paul Gascoigne out of the 1998 World Cup finals. But he wasn't fit enough and once that decision is made, as a manager and a group of players, you forget about who isn't there and focus on the job. — Glenn Hoddle

In terms of whether or not you'll see other heroes along the way, you absolutely will. But, one of the things that makes our Avengers show unique is that this is our cast. We want to be able to focus on this group, much like they did in the movie. — Jeph Loeb

I've never been in a focus-group meeting. I wonder how many anchors can say that. — Shepard Smith

Come now, gentlemen." Ashton's steely tone stopped the two men. "Do we need to solve this in a ring?"
"I wouldn't recommend that," Godric said with a wry grin. "But if it does come to it, I'll stake ten pounds on Charles."
Both Cedric and Charles shared cautious looks with one another before declining, perhaps in part because none of the others would take that bet. Ashton dropped his hand when he seemed satisfied that Cedric would not resume trying to kill Charles. Lucien gave a sigh of relief. He had no desire to jump between his friends. Charles was a champion boxer and Lucien didn't want a blackened eye simply because he'd try to impose peace. If Ashton wished to risk his face, that was entirely up to him.
Jonathan, who had lingered at the edge of the group, suddenly spoke up. "Is this how all of your League meetings go? Perhaps we might focus ourselves back on the real problem and the importance of protecting the ladies."

-His Wicked Seduction — Lauren Smith

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group. — Clayton Christensen

One of the cool things we're seeing at TaskRabbit is local tech and gaming startups hiring TaskRabbits to test their products and deliver immediate user feedback. As the founder of a tech startup, I can tell you that this type of focus group testing is paramount - and usually really pricey and difficult to coordinate. — Leah Busque

I was the person, I think, who first said the evening of September 11 that we shouldn't hold this against the Arab community, the Muslim community. We should focus on the individuals and that groups that were involved and not participate in group blame. — Rudy Giuliani

One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. After history's first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten. — John Scalzi

I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it. — J.K. Rowling

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. — Clay Shirky

When I looked a little closer, I noticed a guy sitting in the dark, tapping his leg in slow, deliberate movements. His head was cast down, but his eyes...his eyes looked directly at me. My breath caught. I tried to focus on what was being said, but the penetrating gaze from the guy in shadows made my heart pound wildly. When my eyes found their way back to him, I noticed the scowl on his face and immediately looked away. My goodness, this was going to be a long meeting. — Maayan Nahmani

It is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within. — Bell Hooks

Always think at least two steps ahead [in everything, with everyone]. — A.J. Darkholme

In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience
the familiar leavened by the novel
Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success. — Winifred Gallagher

I would advise you not to focus on how to stop being lonely, but on how to start feeling understood. Less group time, more one-on-ones, more confessionals, more secrets over wine, more exploration and honesty and vulnerability toward what you want. More moments being you, fewer acting like the you that you believe people expect. — Kelton Wright

I want to try and stay focused on the next game. I'm pretty good at doing that, but to be there right now, it has been a blessing up to this point. Being here in Montreal and being healthy and playing with this group of guys. — Anthony Calvillo

No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus. — Richard Louv

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use. — Jamie Zawinski

You're jumping into the navigating part too soon. Maybe you should focus on the beauty of those stars up there apart from their function. Just take them in, admire them, before you expect them to lead the way. Besides, who's to say that one group of stars belongs together and only together? Those stars up there are drawn to each other in lots of different ways. They're connected in unexpected ways, just like people. — Clare Vanderpool

One bit in or out of focus makes the difference between our bodies being ourselves and our being part of a group. I want to melt the idea of specificity and blend individuality into the crowd. — Ross Bleckner

I don't belong to a church or political party or a group of any kind. I feel that Amnesty International is the most civilized organization in history. Its currency is the written word. Its weapon is the letter; that's why I am a member. I believe in its non-violence; I believe in its effectiveness. Its dignity and its sense of commitment. Its focus on individuals and the concentration and tenacity with which they defend those imprisoned for their ideas has earned it the cautious respect of repressive governments throughout the world. — Sting

The fact is, I find it extremely difficult to force myself to read old letters ... Whenever one really knows the facts, one finds that what is accepted by contemporaries or posterity as the truth about them is so distorted or out of focus that it is not worth worrying about. — Leonard Woolf

The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won't get out of bed in the morning unless they've had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out. — Paul Keating

Forget "minimum viable products" - ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others' successes. — Peter Thiel

You write things that are of interest to you. There's no focus group. — Zach Galifianakis

Growing up in a group home, and with an undiagnosed learning disability to boot, the odds of success were not on my side. But when I joined the high school football team, I learned the value of discipline, focus, persistence, and teamwork - all skills that have proven vital to my career as a C.E.O. and social entrepreneur. — Darell Hammond