Final Report of MRS/NSF Focus Groups
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Final Report of MRS/NSF Focus Groups held at the 1997 MRS Spring Meeting • March 31-April 4 • San Francisco, California Introduction In 1997, Materials Research Society (MRS) offered to provide input from its membership to the Division of Materials Research Division (DMR) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on certain aspects of DMR funding policy and process. To gather that input, MRS decided to hold focus groups at its Spring meeting held in San Francisco, CA, March 31-April 4. This report describes the approach used to set up and facilitate the meetings, presents results of the focus groups, and concludes with a commentary on those results and recommendations for further exploration of selected issues. Approach MRS decided that the type of information solicited at this stage would be better acquired through use of a qualitative data collection tool such as a focus group than it would through a quantitative instrument such as a survey.1 MRS realized that this type of collection and analysis yields results that are indicative of the nature of the larger population, not predictive. However, appropriately designed and executed qualitative data collection exercises can give a clear picture of the tendencies of the larger population that can be explored later in greater depth if so desired, significantly contributing to the effectiveness of the quantitative data collection instruments. Furthermore, focus groups give the researcher the opportunity to pursue issues in depth, and allow the elicitation of what may be unexpected information. MRS decided to run six focus groups. The number of groups was somewhat driven by the structure of the meeting itself: It was anticipated that recruitment would be easier and attendance higher (and attrition lower) if the groups were held during the lunch or dinner meal period. Meeting attendees would be less likely to have competing claims on these time slots than they would if the groups were held in a slot concurrent with technical sessions or other formally scheduled
meeting events. Furthermore, the offer of a meal as incentive to attend (in lieu of the cash payment frequently offered by focus group sponsors) was seen as a real, positive inducement to MRS members. Efforts were made to recruit 15 participants for each group. The participants were selected according to a nonprobability quota sampling strategy. That is, MRS determined that it wanted each group to be "representative" of its membership. It determined that there were four primary demographic characteristics of its membership that contributed to "typicality" employment (academia, industry, or national laboratories); whether the member was a "regular" or a student member; residence (U.S. or non-U.S.); and length of tenure in MRS (one year or more, or a new member as of this meeting). The distribution of these characteristics in MRS are shown in Figure 1. The makeup of the set recruited for each focus group closely matched this distribution of demographics. (Note that this sample did not account for combinations of the
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