1. Using Focus Groups to
Develop a Text Message-
Based Nutrition
Education Program
Katherine E. Speirs (kspeirs@umd.edu)
Stephanie K. Grutzmacher (grutz@umd.edu)
Ashley Munger (mungerale@gmail.com)
University of Maryland School of Public Health &University of Maryland Extension
2012 Priester National Extension Health Conference
April 10-12
Washington D.C.

2. Focus Groups
• Purpose: to explore opinions, thoughts and feelings about an
issue, program, product, or idea.
• Group interview
• Interactions between participants
• Can be used at multiple stages of program planning
• Needs assessment
• Program development and refinement
• Evaluation

3. Logistics
• Recruitment
• Purposive sampling
• 6 – 10 participants
• Incentives
• Multiple groups
• Interview Guide
• Degree of structure depends on purpose
• Open-ended questions
• What makes this poster interesting? Vs. Is this poster interesting?

4. Logistics
• Moderating
• Keep discussion on topic while encouraging participants to
interact freely
• Make participants feel comfortable
• Space
• Convenient and familiar for participants
• Set-up for participant interaction (e.g., participants can see
each other)
• Set-up to allow for audio or video recording

5. Benefits
• Flexible
• Efficient
• Emphasizes group interaction
• May capture the complexity of everyday life

6. Challenges
• Social conformity
• Dull group
• Individuals’ personalities
• Dominating
• Timid
• Verbose
• Irrelevant
• Generalizability

7. Text2BHealthy
• Text message-based nutrition education and
physical activity promotion program
• Parents are sent 2-3 messages a week
• Evaluation
• Pre and post-test paper surveys
• Questions sent via text message

8. Participants
• 3 focus groups (between 5 and 10
participants in each group)
• Low-income mothers
• Recruited through existing FSNE classes

9. Questions
Program Design
• Feasibility of using text messages with low-income
parents
• Frequency of messages
• Language for text messages
• Marketing materials
Evaluation
• Survey length, layout, and content

11. Which texting style do you like
better?
1. Strawberries sale @ Giant 2moro
2. Strawberries are on sale at Giant
tomorrow
Follow up questions: Why do you prefer the one
that you selected?
Is there anything that is hard to understand
about either message?

12. What did we learn?
How did we use what
we learned?

13. Text4Health
or
Text2BHealthy
?

14. Program Design
• Text-isms (LOL, ttyl)
• Multiple cell phones
• Familiarity with text message programs

15. Evaluation
• Reduce or eliminate skip patterns
• Restart numbering at the beginning of
each section
• Shorten the survey
• Use color printing
for photographs

16. Acknowledgements
This project was funded by USDA's Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program in cooperation with the
Maryland Department of Human Resources and the
University of Maryland.
We would also like to thank the parents who
participated in our focus groups, the FSNE educators
who helped us recruit our participants, and Jessica
DiBari for her comments on this presentation.