6a - Pilot Focus group and Survey

In my job role working with adults with learning disabilities we regularly have team meetings where we discuss everything that is related to each of the individuals we support and also our general working environment. This I considered was a perfect place to pilot my focus group.

Everyone present entered with the expectation that they would be required to share their opinions, on matter which are relevant to their working environment. This usually leads to open and frank discussions on a range of issues.

Organising and taking advantage of this was easy for me, as I was able to ask my manager “gatekeeper” to save me a short amount of time at the end of our meeting for me to ask my questions. Our meeting are also recorded and then typed into documents for staff review so this gave me an unbiased method of recording the interactions.

I related my initial questions to a particular person who we all were aware of who was undergoing a form of creative therapy, in order to get a response on how relevant or helpful the staff perceived this as being. And also to discuss the format and range of creative sessions that are available to the adults we support.

I hoped that this focus group would not only allow me to experiment with this approach but to also monitor the value of my enquiry idea by judging the scope of interest or support for creative session with my colleagues.

I hoped this would be useful as rather than explaining my enquiry intension and them giving me a polite, but not necessarily truthful response, I was simply able to begin a discussion on what appeared to be a general issue within our working environment. 

My final pilot to plan is the survey. This is the one that I feel the least confident with. I think that surveys are often completed under duress, because you have been asked to you click though a few answers and write as little as you can to get the job done. For this reason I created a short survey, in the hope that it may get completed. I included closed questions in order for me to be able to analyse the data, but then also provided bboxes to enable the participant to elaborate on their responses.

I considered creating an online survey, I joined survey monkey and began to create. I then considered the people that I wanted to target with my survey, and that was key workers who support adults with learning disabilities. These people do not spend their time sat at desk on computers they are out and about in the community supporting individuals. I decided it would make more sense to provide a paper copy, that they could complete during a shift and then return to me.

I wanted to ask questions about how the individuals they know experience creative arts and the impact that they feel this has on them. The survey questionnaire can be found here.

Pilot Survey