New technologies continue to push the boundaries of collaboration, bringing together geographically dispersed people into a single, virtual space. Combined with budget pressures, the availability of high-speed Internet and online communication platforms encourage opportunities to use virtual focus groups.Virtual, or online, focus groups may be either asynchronous or synchronous (Mann and Stewart 2001). In asynchronous focus groups, participants access a site to answer moderator-posed questions or respond to other participants' comments. Participants in synchronous focus groups interact with the moderator and each other "live."Despite conditions favoring their use, comparatively little literature exists on using online focus groups for social science research, particularly webinar-type synchronous focus groups. Mayer and colleagues (2006a; 2006b) conducted five such groups with caregivers and providers of pediatric patients and found that participants in the chat-based groups were able to share their experiences and express emotions by using emoticons available in the conferencing system. Participants' comfort with the messaging technology varied, and some required assistance with technical problems such as logging on or using the software.Underhill and Olmsted (2003) compared transcripts from face-to-face focus groups and chat-based, online focus groups and found no significant differences in participation rates, the number of unique ideas generated, the total number of relevant comments, or participant satisfaction. However, more off-topic comments were generated in the online groups.What literature exists on this topic originated nearly a decade ago, and technological innovations affecting this data collection method evolve rapidly.In this paper, we draw from our experiences on two recent studies to describe considerations for using online, synchronous focus groups as well as lessons learned from implementing them.

Providing meaningful incentives demonstrates to respondents that researchers understand the competing demands on their time and value their input. The effects of incentives, particularly when prepaid, are strongly established in survey research literature as effective tools for increasing response. However, effectiveness of incentives on web-administered surveys is less clear, and can be impacted by a number of factors, including incentive type and amount, timing, and mode of survey administration. This paper seeks to contribute to research on incentives for web-based surveys by examining the effects of the following: This paper uses data collected during the first wave of a nationally-representative survey of public school principals designed to take place across three waves of data collection. To determine a maximally-effective incentive strategy for subsequent years, we embedded an experiment into the study using electronic gift cards. All sample members were eligible for a standard $50 post-response incentive, but were also randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: (1) an additional $50 incentive for completing early in the field period, (2) a $25 incentive prepaid with the initial survey mailing, (3) a $25 prepaid incentive used during nonresponse follow-up, and (4) the standard $50 post response incentive, which serves as the control group for this experiment.

We analyze the role of newly integrated data from the child support and child welfare systems in seeding a major policy change in Wisconsin. Parents are often ordered to pay child support to offset the costs of their children’s stay in foster care. Policy allows for consideration of the “best interests of the child.” Concerns that charging parents could delay or disrupt reunification motivated our analyses of integrated data to identify the impacts of current policy. We summarize the results of the analyses and then focus on the role of administrative data in supporting policy development. We discuss the potential and limitations of integrated data in supporting cross-system innovation and detail a series of complementary research efforts designed to support implementation.

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