This study identified youth and adult perceptions of factors that influence initiation of youth drinking, access to alcohol, strategies for deterring youth drinking, and parents' role in prevention. A combination of qualitative (focus group and individual interview) and quantitative (written survey) community-based participatory research methods…

Sixteen disability service providers from 2-year and 4-year public and private postsecondary institutions were divided into 2 focus groups, each with 8 participants. When asked to share their perspectives on the implementation of Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) on their campus, service providers described strengths and weaknesses of UDI,…

The second language student experience of group work at university is not often transparent in survey evaluations, although the multicultural nature of the student population in Australasia would suggest that culture and language should be on the research agenda. Culture and language, notwithstanding, is used in the higher education literature to…

We were interested in how low-income African American fathers of 12-year-old children in families identified as high risk viewed their role as father. Four focus group discussions involving 19 fathers were conducted. We had four key questions: (1) what the men perceived as the children's needs, (2) how they met those needs, (3) what motivated them…

This article describes research undertaken to investigate aspects of Thai culture and its effects on Thai students in an international school in Thailand. Using a variety of data gathering methods, the investigation looks at how Thai culture manifests itself in the classroom in the form of student behaviour and attitudes. The research also…

The aims of this paper are (a) to investigate how adolescents perceive and represent the body form with respect to being fat or thin, and (b) to describe the process of how they constructed the social representations for these latter two body conditions. The data were collected by means of individual and focus group interviews with adolescent…

Occupational noise-induced hearing loss is the second most self-reported occupational illness or injury in the United States. Among coal miners, more than 90% of the population reports a hearing deficit by age 55. In this formative evaluation, focus groups were conducted with coal miners in Appalachia to ascertain whether miners perceive hearing…

This study describes the development and psychometric evaluation of four scales measuring leadership for health promotion at an organizational level in the baseline survey (n = 144) of the Alberta Heart Health Project. Content validity was established through a series of focus groups and expert opinion appraisals, pilot testing of a draft based on…

This research examines the reasons behind marketing majors' decision to select marketing as a major, where students have the option to select more than one major toward their undergraduate degree. Results of surveys conducted at two universities, one in Australia and one in New Zealand, provide some new findings as well as extending findings from…

Purpose: This study is part of a larger project, which aims to develop medicine education materials for teachers. The aim of the present study was to discover children's interests in medicines and teachers' opinions on what should be taught about medicines to children of different ages. Furthermore, teachers' opinions were assessed about the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the level of college men's understanding about women's bodies (i.e., reproductive anatomy and physiology) in order to structure learning experiences of most relevance and interest to them. A grounded theory research design, using the constant comparative method, was used in order to gain a deeper…

Despite growing interest in evaluative inquiry as a trigger for development of organizational learning capacity, there exists a paucity of empirical research in this area. This is particularly the case in the context of schools, where systematic inquiry to support decision making and problem solving is hardly a mainstream activity. The purpose of…

The Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG) combines social ecological and social marketing approaches to promote girls' participation in physical activity programs implemented at 18 middle schools throughout the United States. Key to the TAAG approach is targeting materials to a variety of audience segments. TAAG segments are individuals…

Academic developers of online courses may not have experienced this mode of learning and teaching from the learner perspective. This article makes a comparison between suggestions for online course design from research literature and user perspectives from a focus group, responses to questions on the most and least effective aspects of online…

While numerous approaches exist to gather information from families having cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds and who have children with developmental disabilities, the use of assistive technology (AT) focus groups holds great promise for professionals. This article provides an overview of a process that can be implemented in school…