Facilitation Support for On-line Focus Group Discussions by Message Feature Map

Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Shunsuke Saruwatari, Xavier Llorà, David E. Goldberg (2007)

Illinois Technical Report No. 2007020 Link to the PDF.

To build marketing strategy, face-to-face focus group discussion has been one of the reliable approaches for collecting variety of ideas and opinions for long years. Although various network-based communication tools have been available, on-line focus group discussions have not been popular yet. This is due to complications in facilitation of on-line discussions. The facilitators have to observe and control the discussions carefully and skillfully, which is far more difficult on on-line than on off-line. The goal of this paper is to maximize the profit from on-line focus group discussions by supporting facilitators’ task. We suppose that the on-line discussion is a discussion that are done by posting and replying messages on on-line threaded discussion board. First, we propose a message feature map and two metrics for measuring message feature; centrality and novelty. The message feature map plots discussion messages on centrality-novelty plane, and gives us intuitive understanding of the discussions in various aspects. Then, reporting experimental results by using real data collected in on-line focus group discussions, we discuss how we can utilize the message feature map for the effective facilitation.

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