[In this video, six people are having a conversation. The people’s names are Chelsea Jordan-Makely, Charissa Brammer, Amy Bahlenhorst, Sara Wicen, Carol Peeples, and Renee Barnes.]

 Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Have you ever led a focus group before and did you have formal training in leading focus groups? Can we start with Carol this time?

Carol Peeples: Sure, thanks. I had. I went to Graduate School a couple years ago and public affairs and did my Master’s that involved my master’s work involved…Our capstone involved a lot of focus groups that I did under a the tutelage of my sponsor and she was really good, Doctor Mary Dodge. And so that I guess would be my formal training and the only training. I used to be an English teacher. So, and that kind of felt like some background with me…yeah, but that that was it. But I gotta put in a couple points. My staff did not. Most of my staff had been formally incarcerated and they went out and just, I don’t know, we did it together. They watched and then they learned and they were able to take over and do really well. So, I think a lot of it is communication style as well and just setting up the questions before you start the focus groups.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: That’s cool. I didn’t realize that you had a train-the-trainer sort of model there… another great outcome that I hadn’t considered. What about you Charissa?

Charissa Brammer: I came out of academic libraries, so I’ve done a lot of focus grouping, primarily around like user experience up to this point, so I had the experience of doing them, but not to this scale. And I did take some classes actually at CU Denver in that same department, on research and analysis. And so there have been some small focus group components of that, but this definitely was like a learn by doing situation, a lot of the time.

Sara Wicen: Yeah, I can jump in. I had limited focus group experience prior. Nothing at the scale like Charissa said. I’ve moderated panels before, but I took a facilitators training the January before we started focus groups. It was a two-day training that was set up by Colorado Humanities on facilitating reflective community conversations. So it was pretty applicable actually like the tough conversations and it was really helpful to just get in a room and practice with people beforehand. And then also part of my role for the Library Research Service is creating some content on research and data collection and analysis and knowing that we were going to go in and do these focus groups I focused quite a bit on writing on focus groups and how to facilitate focus groups and did a webinar on it so that I could learn from others and kind of share what I’d been looking into as well, and that was helpful. But it’s really…I think that I learned much more in my time conducting the focus groups in the prisons than I could have ever learned prior to starting.

Amy Bahlenhorst: I’m similar to Sara. I didn’t have any real formal experience or training. I will say the two things that I did have that were really helpful with this were being a former public librarian and having reference interview experience. It’s really, really similar to that kind of how to pry information out of people without feeling like you’re prying. And then same as Charissa, some research methods and education in Graduate School. So, it was a new experience for me and but yeah, same as Sara learned a lot through just doing.

Charissa Brammer: You can definitely if when you look at the transcripts like overtime, you can definitely see us getting better at it as we go. You can see it getting smoother and the facilitation going easier and yeah.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Mmmhmm. And, Renee, you did not lead any focus groups, is that correct?

Barnes, Renee: Correct. I just was in the room.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Awesome that must have been interesting too, weere you ever like biting your tongue, wanting to jump in? Be like, yeah.

Barnes, Renee: Uh I would write down things that we would talk about after they finish the focus group. So I wanted to make sure people were aware of like, things that they didn’t know, that they had access to interlibrary loan or they didn’t know that they could request materials or…so writing down things to make sure that we…I could touch base with them after they had finished their focus groups.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: Oh. Yeah, I think that’s so important.

Charissa Brammer: Yeah. Yeah, we did, we’ve talked about this a couple times. We did a very like strict way of setting these up where it was like pure research in the beginning so. We basically just pretended like Renee and her team weren’t there during the focus groups. We went through them and then at the end, then we stopped, we stopped recording and then they came in and answered questions. Like a really exciting moment for me was when I got to explain to people why librarians take things off the shelf, why you need that space on a shelf. That was fun, but that was after the focus group part.

Chelsea Jordan-Makely:When I was in Library school and we learned about the different forms of research methods, I felt really intimidated about focus groups because I heard, you know, there’s so much to set up. And they’re so cost prohibitive for libraries, and you usually need to provide food for people. And so, I just thought like that it was a tool that I’d never really get to use and my career and it’s really great to see all of this working and how each of you approached it.