Q. We need to know more about how people in our target audience feel about a very sensitive issue. We would love to hear it discussed in a Focus Group setting, but don’t know if people will be comfortable enough to talk or secure enough to be honest. What do you think?

A. I get this type of request more and more frequently. Organizations want to understand feelings about sensitive issues ranging from racial attitudes to cosmetic surgery to money issues to the death penalty — and everything in between.

There are ways to do Focus Groups which will surface deep feelings about these difficult-to-discuss subjects. Here are a few ideas that have worked for me:

1. The groups should not be too large. On sensitive subjects, I like to work with 5-6 people rather than the more usual 8-12. People share more easily with fewer people in the room. And it is much more difficult for respondents to choose not to participate in a smaller group.

2. The groups should have something pretty obvious in common — all women, all older, all have had a certain type of surgery, all students, etc. This allows them to become comfortable with one another more quickly.

3. The session should be structured so that the participants are responding to stimuli rather than just being asked to state an opinion about a sensitive subject outright. Projective techniques like collage-building are often used. Or, respondents are asked for their reactions to statements that “someone else made” about the subject. They are reacting to stimuli which will evoke their true feelings, not being forced to make a personal and/or emotional confession.

4. Let them write it. At the end of the session, respondents are asked to write down anything that they think the organization should know or do which wasn’t mentioned in the session. This is completely anonymous, left in the center of the table after the session.

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