Myself and colleagues have conducted 3 focus groups of international professionals to review a new assessment tool in healthcare. One of us made detailed notes throughout the focus groups and then the recordings were listened afterwards and further notes were made.
These notes were then used to inform the next phase of review of the tool and we made many changes based on the focus groups feedback. Once completed, the tool was then sent back to the participants for member checking/review.
Originally we were going to summarise our changes to the tool and use quotes from the focus groups to support the changed areas or additions to the assessment tool.
The question is, should we also analyse the focus group transcripts for qualitative themes? Or is what we have done sufficient?
I would say that your analysis is adequate for your goals. From a mixed methods research perspective, what you have done would be: your focus groups are a qualitative tool for the goal of improving the questionnaire. So, your qualitative project is designed to meet the needs of the quantitative component.
Doing a full scale analysis using transcripts would be necessary if you were doing a full-scale qualitative study, which you are not. One thing I would avoid, however, is using the word "theme" because this is usually used to summarize the results from a qualitative study.. In this case, you do not have a set of qualitative themes, but instead a set of revisions to the questionnaire.
Bill Ahessy according to your question, you were aiming at improving an assessment tool by getting input from international professionals, and from your submission, it is clear that you have achieved this. Analyzing the transcripts would be additional work to you that doesn't seem relevant to your objective.
Agree with the above.
If you feel there's some really interesting data about the topic itself, you could consider a second study analysing that, but it depends e.g., on what ethical consent you have from participants, whether the methodology is rigorous and appropriate for that kind of study. Is it a seam of gold or random nuggets?
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