Boston Fights Drugs Individual Case Assignment 2 Study

Boston Fights Drugs Individual Assignment 2 - Case Study Example 2. Would you have selected focus groups as your research methodology? Why/Why not? List the pros and cons of using focus groups in this situation, as well as the pros and cons of the other suggested methods in the case For such a sensitive issue, the student group should not have selected a focus group but, rather, they should have chosen the on-on-one interview. While the focus group allows people to exchange ideas, the answers they give could be impacted by peer pressure (Mitchell & Jolley, 2013). For the one-on-one interview, there would have been minimal peer pressure, the participants would have the opportunity to talk more, and could even encourage participants to share information that would have been otherwise not shared in a focus group. However, it is more expensive and requires more time for data collection (Mitchell & Jolley, 2013). The pre-screening questionnaire was devised to ensure broad representation of the entire Boston population, while partially disguising why the focus group was being conducted. Questions required participants to identify their favorite commercials, as well as their take on street violence, attitudes on drugs, and personal habits (Rangan, 1994). The interview protocol acted as a guide to direct the discussion to the researcher’s topics of interests. Given the budgetary and time constraints, the group did well in participant screening. However, this did not allow them to pick focus groups from all Boston neighborhoods as they focused on only four neighborhoods and selected a sole young adult group using the pre-screening questionnaires. In the sampling procedure, the student group sought help from Boston officials to recruit participants from various city community schools. They also divided the population into four groups, which were addicts, active users, recreational users, and non-users (Rangan, 1994). Due to a lack of resources to track all the