The New Age of Research

With the mobile culture that young people have adopted recently, tracking down college students in the greater D.C. area to attend a focus group about Metro policies must not be easy. Or is it?

Last week sometime I logged into my Facebook account to find an invitation to that very focus group. The creator of the event works for the research group who is conducting the focus group and he had invited a whole lot of his college age "friends" on the social networking site to participate. Other age groups were apparently invited through other means. After all, how many middle aged and elderly people have Facebook profiles?

The interesting part of the invitation was the number of people who had to be invited through Facebook in order to get a reasonable number of people to RSVP "yes" to the event. To get 7 confirmed guests, there is one "might show up" response, 22 people who said "no," and 20 people never responded to the invitation. So what does this say about communicating with young people?

Even though the image of the young professional or college/graduate student today is attached to the cell phone and the PDA, we are so mobile in a physical sense that tracking us down still proves to be difficult. That serves as quite a problem to researchers whose job it is to get people of all ages to participate in events such as focus groups. The incentive had better be pretty good to get us to sit in a room for an hour and discuss something other than our Master's thesis or Monday Night Football.

If researchers realize these sort of problems they should come up with new ways to approach young people when requesting their input. What about a focus group in a sports bar? Buy everyone a round of Cokes and start with game talk. Then get down to business. Don't disguise the fact that it's a focus group on Metro policies or whatever the topic, but accept the fact that to get some research done you have to accomodate your respondents.

I doubt very much that focus groups will ever be run this way, but who is to say that they wouldn't be successful?