Choice of Target Group

Having fixed what you want to study, the next decision is whom to study. The target group is the specific set of people — or households, firms, shops, and so on — on whom you will focus your attention and from whom you will collect information. Identifying this group correctly is important because the whole questionnaire is built around it: the questions must be appropriate to the people who will answer them, and only a well-chosen target group can give responses that are relevant to your objective.

Why the target group matters. If you approach the wrong people, even a well-designed questionnaire will yield data that cannot answer your question. The choice therefore has to follow directly from the objective set in the previous step. Choosing the target group means deciding which persons are relevant to your problem, so that your attention — and your limited time and effort — is concentrated where the useful information lies.

How the objective decides the target group. The nature of the product or issue tells you which section of the population to approach. The book gives clear illustrations:

• A project about cars. Because cars are bought mainly by better-off buyers, the target group will be chiefly the middle-income and higher-income groups. Surveying very low-income households would add little relevant information.
• A project about a mass-consumption product like soap. Since almost everyone uses soap, the target group is all consumers, both rural and urban — the product is not confined to any one income class.
• A project about the availability of safe drinking water. Here the concern touches everyone, so the target group can again be both the urban and the rural population of the area studied. …