Course Outcomes
This facilitation skills course for qualitative interviewers and group facilitators will:
- Give participants tools and techniques for conducting smoother in-person and virtual group interviews.
- Suggest best practices for explaining goals and setting expectations.
- Recommend guidelines for creating unbiased questions and offering nonjudgmental feedback.
- Offer ideas for building trust and encouraging candor.
- Provide tools for orienting participants and ensuring understanding.
- Share best practices for managing group dynamics.
Program Overview
Well-run focus groups, roundtables, and qualitative interviews can provide researchers with insights not evident in quantitative research. This two-part virtual training session offers best practices for planning and executing in-person and virtual group interviews. Part one focuses on planning and part two on execution.
Segment One Objectives
- Recognize how their assumptions, values, and attitudes can influence the facilitation process.
- Anticipate the participant cohorts they will encounter.
- Explain how research fatigue can disproportionately affect traditionally marginalized or disadvantaged groups.
- Frame the purpose of an event using language all participants will understand.
- Choose ground rules that will help achieve a session’s goal.
- Craft questions that do not lead, communicate conclusions, or pass judgments about a participant’s life choices or circumstances.
- Develop an initial question bank for each anticipated cohort.
Segment One Modules
- Your Lens: The Facilitator’s Assumptions, Values, and Attitudes
- The People in the Room: Skills for Understanding Cohorts
- The Rule Book: Norms and Behaviors
- Adopting a Neutral Stance: Matters of Language
- A Question Map: A Solid Plan but Not a Script
Segment Two Objectives
- Leverage anchors, echoes, and loops to keep discussions on track and ensure understanding.
- Facilitate accurate documentation when using a transcription service, scribe, or minute taker.
- Maintain control of and balance group discussions.
- Probe for additional information.
- Confirm participants have finished sharing.
- Recognize and avoid responses from a facilitator that could praise or criticize a participant’s narrative.
- Use silence and pauses appropriately.
- Move with ease when a conversation stalls.
- Troubleshoot challenges associated with group dynamics.
Segment Two Modules
- Anchor, Echo, Loop: Skills for Orienting and Ensuring Understanding
- Who Said What and More: The Mechanics of Documenting Made Easier
- From Modeling to Answer Stacking: A+ Practices
- Tell Me More: Probes, Prompts, and Follow-Up Questions
- Read the Room: Pauses, Silence, and Moving On
- Troubleshooting: Skills for Solving Challenges
By the conclusion of this four-hour training program, participants should have a range of frameworks and tools at the ready to gather qualitative data in a group setting.
