If you want to learn more about the success of your program without restricting participants answers, you can do a focus group or needs survey. These approaches may also be useful to understanding populations of students, faculty, or staff that have not been engaging with your programming.
Focus Group
Focus groups can be particularly useful when you:
- are considering the introduction of a new program or service.
- want to ask questions that can’t easily be asked or answered on a written survey.
- want to supplement the knowledge you can gain from written surveys.
- know, or can find someone, who is an experienced and skilled group leader.
- have the time, knowledge, and resources to recruit a willing group of focus group participants.
This is also a helpful approach if you don’t yet know what questions you should be asking about your program. Themes may emerge from conversations that give you a better idea about what information to follow up on or track over time. You may find it helpful to review this advice on planning a focus group if you are considering this approach.
For example, these focus groups questions were used after an immersion experience at the University of Dayton:
- How might you see this immersion as an opportunity to explore your vocation?
- What are your core values and how might that relate to your gifts?
- Where do your values come from and how do they impact your decision making?
- How do you envision the immersion program impacting your values and decision making?
- Upon reflecting on your values, what does success mean to you?
Most focus group data are treated as individual comments and reported in much the same way as in-depth interview data, which involves presenting comments from individual participants, often grouped under specific topics. This approach is often sufficient to meet the objectives of most research projects.
Some examples of general questions you can ask as part of a focus group:
- What are some of your thoughts about what’s going on now?
- What are you satisfied about? Why is that? (Or, “What’s going well…?”)
- Are there things you are dissatisfied with, that you would like to see changed? (Or, “What’s not going well…?”)
- (If so) What are they? Why is that? How should they change? What kinds of things would you like to see happen?
- How about this particular aspect (of the topic). What do you think about that?
- Some people have said that one way to improve X is to do Y. Do you agree with this? (Or, “How do you feel about that?”)
- Are there other recommendations that you have, or suggestions you would like to make?
Additional vocation-related focus groups questions that would work for students or faculty and staff come from the evaluation of the Program for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV).
Needs Survey
A needs survey is a way to ask a group or cohort what they see as the most important needs of that group. The results of the survey can then guide future action. Depending on your resources (time, money, and people) a needs assessment survey can be done by personal interview or written response. Besides getting information that will be helpful, needs surveys have the added benefit of increasing the likelihood that the actions you take will be supported by surveyed groups on campus. You may find it helpful to review this advice for planning a needs survey.
When might you use a needs survey:
- To learn more about what your group or community needs are. It can give you detailed information from a larger and more representative group of people than you could get from observation alone.
- To get a more honest and objective description of needs than people might tell you publicly.
- To become aware of possible needs that you never saw as particularly important or that you never even knew existed.
- To document your needs, as is required in many applications for funding, and as is almost always helpful in advocating for your cause.
- To make sure any actions you eventually take or join in are in line with needs that are expressed by the community.
- To get more group and community support for the actions you will soon undertake. That’s because if people have stated a need for a particular course of action, they are more likely to support it.
- To get more people actually involved in the subsequent action itself.
Example questions:
- How has the institution supported or not supported your experience as a student in this program?
- What can the institution do moving forward to further support your experience in this program?
- What have you heard from students about why they are (or are not) participating?
- Do you participate in our vocation programming?
- What is your preferred method of participation?
- What issues related to vocation are most important to you?
- What are the things that prevented you from participating in the programming?
- Did any of the following barriers prevent you from participating in our programming?
- Caring for a family member
- Need transportation
- Needed to work
- Didn’t seem like it was for me
- Other (specify)
Here is another example of a needs survey that includes multiple choice questions about a curriculum development effort.
For each of the items below, please indicate the extent to which it is important to the success of the curriculum development effort that we are pursuing as part of our NetVUE grant. (1=Not Important; 2=Somewhat Important; 3=Important; 4=Critically Important).
- Regular communication with colleagues in the department
- Regular communication with colleagues in other departments
- Collaboration with the associate dean of general education
- Building consensus across campus
- Input from students
- Research on comparable curricular efforts
- Not rushing the process towards completion
- An assessment plan for its success after it is completed and implemented
Follow Up
Are you grappling with what to do next or how to move vocation efforts forward on your campus? You may want to consider a campus consultation.
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