One of the most difficult aspects of putting together a focus group is selecting a wide enough group of participants for the study, yet still being able to fit travel costs into the research budget. For example, if you are interested in the reasons why women from Cuba smoke, you would need to recruit a broad sample of Cuban smokers from various parts of the United States; otherwise your research would not be generalizable for the whole country. However, Cuban women living in Alabama might smoke for different reasons from Cuban women from New York City. Your research budget might not accommodate flying participants or researchers for an ideal representative sample.
When you conduct cross-cultural research, you are likely to encounter or even to purposefully recruit participants who do not speak your your language. You may choose to hire a facilitator who is a native speaker of the language in the dialect that the focus group participants speak; for example, Puerto Rican Spanish. In addition, the interpreter must be familiar with the context of the study, such as medical Spanish in order to be able to phrase the questions accurately according to the specific terms of the study. You may be surprised to find that it can be very difficult to locate someone with the qualifications that you need.
Once you arrive at an appropriate sample group, you must decide which questions to ask. Open-ended questions are best because they facilitate discussion rather than limit it to a prescribed answer. For example, asking "How do you feel about this image as it related to the topic of birth control?" is a better question than "Does this image explain how to use the birth control device?" At the same time, asking very direct questions, particularly those about personal matters, might offend women from cultures in which direct questions are considered rude or in which discussing personal matters with strangers is considered taboo.
When you have acquired your focus group data, you must decide how to analyze it. You'll have to look at the transcripts and the individual responses as well. Some cultures, such as the Chinese culture, consider answering a question in negative terms to be rude; as such, a member of from this type of culture might not answer your question directly or state plainly what they mean. For example, in such a culture a response of "I will have to read this message again" may mean "This is poorly written." As a researcher, you will have to carefully decode these responses and decide what they mean.