Course Insight for Module 1

The main point I have taken from the first couple classes is the importance of doing pretesting and focus groups. They are the building blocks of an intervention/program and without having done pretesting and focus groups to obtain the information that is needed to ensure relevance and opinions of the group being targeted the intervention could be useless. Putting a little time and effort in the beginning to understand the target audience and gain their opinion will easily pay for itself in increased effectiveness later down the road.

My next most important insight was the difference between high and low envolvement of individuals and the different ways in which to target them in advertising. This is very useful when starting to think of a campaing/issue/or intervention. It is good to look at the differences between a high and low envolvement group. For low envolvement I think humor is an esspecially effective way to reach the audience. In any cause it is valuable to be able to see what kinds of messages would potentially work and what to focus on.

An idea I had not thought about much before these readings and class was the concept of “gatekeepers” and how they can give insight to the problems and issues the target population has. I think this will be useful going forward to be able to think of people who we can go to and ask for their insight.

For the readings this week I though the Diabetes handbook on conducting focus groups could have been improved. Parts of it were a good outline- like the developing a plan section. But then there was a lot of really common sense things that it was hard to believe they where even writing – much less expanding on and telling stories about. I am not sure who this was originally written for but I thought it was incredibly funny that under holding an effective focus group they listed things like “arrive early, check for outlets, see if the room is noisy”. To me it seemed beyond basic. They actually told the readers how to look up translation services in the yellow pages….

The Pinkbook article was good to push the importance of pretesting materials.