Final answer:
While online focus groups can effectively gather what participants think and believe, they don't necessarily showcase real-life behavior, which is not an advantage of online focus groups. Challenges include time consumption, difficulty in encouraging responses, and ensuring genuineness and representativeness of these responses.
Step-by-step explanation:
Advantages of online focus groups include a variety of benefits, but there are also some limitations that should not be considered advantages. The advantages of online focus groups often encompass aspects like geographic flexibility, convenience, and cost-effectiveness. Still, one potential disadvantage, often mistaken for an advantage, is the assumption that they capture how people behave in real life. While online focus groups can capture what people think and believe, they do not necessarily represent how individuals act outside the virtual environment.
Key Challenges of Online Focus Groups
Online focus groups, though valuable for gathering opinions and insights, can be time-consuming to manage effectively. They also require effort to encourage participant response, and it can be challenging to assess the truthfulness of those responses. An important note is that such online methods mainly represent participants' declared beliefs and thoughts, but they lack the capability to demonstrate actual behavior or actions that would occur in a physical setting.
Furthermore, factors such as self-selected samples, where responses come only from individuals who opt to participate, can introduce biases and make it difficult to achieve a representative sample. Moreover, the use of technology also has its complications, such as designing surveys that work across different browsers and devices, and preventing individuals from participating multiple times using multiple accounts.
In-person Focus Groups
In contrast, in-person focus groups, such as those conducted using traditional methods, tend to offer more direct interaction, allowing for observation of non-verbal cues and more controlled environments to assess behavior and reactions.
When the question of why choosing a random sample is effective, the correct answer is that it gives everyone the same chance of being part of the study, thereby helping to ensure the sample is representative of the population as a whole.
Given the context, it is clear that capturing what people think and believe, but not necessarily how they behave in real life, cannot be listed as an advantage of online focus groups. Thus, the correct option that is not an advantage is Captures what people think and believe, but not necessarily how they behave in real life.