Focus Group ideas

To help with ideas for my preliminary task of making a school magazine, we had a focus group today in which we spoke to a member of staff and a small group of year 7 students.

On some ideas the staff and the students agreed, however there were points where they had different opinions on certain aspects.

They both agreed that the following ideas would be worth including:

• Term dates
• The canteen menu
• Thought for the week
• Reports and images form school trips
• General news from the school 
• Bright colours
• Profiles of certain, featured members of staff
• Pullout posters for special occasions

They also agreed on the frequency of the magazine being every half term, rather than weekly or monthly, as they felt that not only would it be hard to fill each one with enough content, but also that the students would get bored of them if they were too frequent.

One idea that seemed to cause some disagreement was of having subject specific quizzes in each issues, the member of staff thought that this would be a good idea that would excite the students, however a split of roughly half of the group thought that they would find these quizzes boring and would only really do them if they were very bored.

The students were more in favour of the idea for competitions or quizzes where they could win prizes, and they felt that other students would find the idea of a prize to be more appealing.