Focus Groups & Interviews

Let our professional staff assist you with a qualitative approach to measuring consumers’ subjective responses to the sensory properties of products. This is achieved by having consumers discuss your products during interviews or small group settings led by one of our staff’s highly trained interviewers/moderators. These methods include:

  • Focus group sessions- product concept discussions with a sample of  consumers
  • Individual interviews- product concept and use discussions with an individual

These methods can be used to uncover consumer needs, assess consumers’ initial responses to a product concept, learn consumer-oriented terms to describe the sensory attributes of your product concept/category, expand on consumers’ responses from quantitative research and gain insight into consumer behavior regarding product use.

Our facilities include the following:

  • Video and audio recording capabilities (DVD-R/DVD-RW/MP3 formats)
  • High-speed wireless internet

Typical project steps:

  • Initial Consultation: We discuss your product or concepts for evaluation to determine your objective for the sessions. We provide you with a proposed session summary, outlining the appropriate method.
  • Project Design: We work with you to establish the session design, including the number of consumers, screening criteria, budget and timeline. Once the project design is agreed upon, we complete and sign the service contract.
  • Project Preparation: We design a consumer recruitment screener, moderator/interviewer outline, and/or a ballot/survey. Our staff, with your guidance, prepares any concept presentation materials or food concept samples and provides you with preparation directions and presentation methods.
  • Sessions: We assure the focus group/interviews are conducted in a timely, quality manner. After the sessions are complete, we debrief what you viewed.
  • Analysis/Interpretation: We tabulate any survey results and analyze recorded sessions.
  • Report Generation:We collate all aspects of the study into one concise, yet detailed, report. In this report, we interpret the results and relate them to the answers you seek. Upon request, we will provide you with DVDs of audio and visual recordings from sessions.

Contact Us About Your Testing Needs!

sue.queisser@oregonstate.edu

541-737-6506