A social worker wants to establish outpatient services for older citizens in a major hospital but wants to obtain their perspectives. She segments this population into ambulatory but relatively healthy older people and those with more acute rather than chronic conditions. Realizing that older people in her hospital’s service area are Caucasian and Asian,she draws well older people from these two groups to form two focus groups.
The social worker develops the following broad questions:
1. What kinds of medical problems or issues do you (well older people) have?
2. Where do you currently receive outpatient medical services?
3. What problems do you experience with the services that you currently receive?
4. If you could establish the ideal outpatient agency for well older people, what would it be like?
5. What dangers or pitfalls would you advise the staff of this outpatient agency to avoid?
The policy advocate gains important insights from the older people she has consulted. For example, she finds that they value continuity of care (i.e., having a regular doctor) more than promptness of service. Armed with insights from her use of focus groups, she develops a proposal for outpatient services that she hopes will be accepted by the hospital’s board of directors.
EXERCISE
Now imagine that you are conducting a focus group with evacuees from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and you want to know what they would want in terms of amenities and quality of life to induce them to return to New Orleans from another city.
Develop a set of questions that you might ask.

Required Texts:

Jansson, B. S. (2014). Becoming an effective policy advocate (7th ed.). Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole/Wadsworth. ISBN-13: 978- 1-285-06407-9