The overall process of choosing and conducting our focus group was valuable in experience and data collected. Our group chose a focus group comprised of a mixture of current young baby boomers and maturing adults entering a new stage in their life. Looking back, the combination of the age groups in a single focus group didn’t yield as great of results as it would have if each age group were in their own session. I did not moderate the focus group but did notice our moderator did really well reading the group and adjusting the questions with the flow of the conversation which led to great results. Moderating a focus group is just facilitating conversation. I think the encouragement to speak off of other participant’s responses would be the best way to moderate and conduct a focus group.
As for the feedback synthesis, we recorded the responses and found that the concept was very well received from most of the group and an interesting insight is that the older generations tended to be less inclined to move now. This may seem like a negative comment but I think that was a great insight into a general issue that is affecting retirement as a whole. People generally do not want to move; now the older baby boomers are in their “forever” homes now but the sentiment was shared within the younger generations as well. We saw this in our synthesis of the data that a forever home was something that was desired however feasibility and practicality are often taken into account as well. This is something Evermore Homes takes advantage of!