Write a moderator guide on a topic of your choosing. There is an example moderat

Write a moderator guide on a topic of your choosing. There is an example moderator guide on Blackboard. For additional examples of moderator guides make sure to review Appendix A – C within the Garrison et al (1999) article. Note though, the Garrison examples are in a different format to what is required here. There is no universal convention for moderator guide formats. You will use your moderator guide to conduct a real 10 minute FG in class next week within a small group. You will work through this document in class but it is unlikely you will finish all the activities listed here during class time. Deadlines for completion of this document will be announced in the weekly to do email.
Note: You should not feel pressured to make your FG guide interesting to your other group members. If your passion or ideal FG topic is something most other people find boring that is ok. Also, if you desire, you can ask your group members to role-play in the live FG. For example if your FG is about why teenage females use Facebook you can ask your group members to pretend to be teenage females in the FG. You will use the data you collect during your live FG to write your FG paper (to be discussed in more detail next week). However, you can use a FG guide on nearly any topic to achieve a good grade in the Focus Group paper. The only restriction is that your topic should not be something that others might consider offensive. Your topic should also not be something that the typical student in the class does not know about for instance a film most in the class have not seen. Given the time constraints of the FG live session you will likely not have time to ask all of your moderator guide questions during next week’s FG. For this reason you should identify your most important questions and make sure you ask these questions in the live session. You do not need to make any notes on the assignment of what you believe your most important questions are, this task of identifying these questions is an ungraded and unreviewed exercise you complete alone in preparation for next week’s FG.
Make sure to do the following:
• Clearly state the topic and write a 3-4 sentence summary of the problem (real or fictional) and the goal(s) of the FG. This is different from the blackboard examples.
• Indicate who participants would be, how you would screen, and reimbursement participants receive for participation. You will not reimburse participants for the FG you conduct next week but pretend that you will.
• For each key question area, include at least one general probe or one specific probe. Mark these with “General Probe” or “Specific Probe”. Have at least three of each somewhere in your moderator guide.
540: W4 Focus group preparation
Your topic should not be one that other students in the class may consider sensitive or intrusive. Concrete examples would be to avoid topics such as sex, drugs, criminal acts, religion, or politics. Although FGs are very useful in these areas such as testing effectiveness of campaign commercials or determining how to promote safe sex, such topics may be offensive to others in the class.
You should not show videos or play music as part of the FG as this takes up too much of the ten minutes you have available to conduct your FG.