Focus groups offer many potential advantages, such as being cost and time effective in collecting information. Morgan [15] noted that a focus group of eight people may generate more ideas than eight individual interviews. Clearly, the strength of the focus group method is that it brings fda approved clients together to discuss their perceptions about the services that they have received. This allows for interaction between group members, which stimulates thoughts and recall of experiences.Focus groups can be particularly helpful for the discovery of service problems and suggestions for fixing those problems [16]. Moreover, the data drawn from focus group interviews can be used to compare data gathered from other research methods, that is, to use focus groups for triangulation [17].

Along the same line, Conners and Franklin [18] provide a strong argument for the use of a qualitative methodology. They stressed that qualitative methodologies may address some concerns about surveys that result in inflated satisfaction scores, as clients are more critical when qualitative methodologies are used, and they have more freedom to express their concerns about all aspects of care in a way that is impossible with many studies. Therefore, qualitative methods are invaluable in providing depth to the exploration of people satisfaction that is not possible with quantitative surveys. As Merriam [19] stressed, ��the product of a qualitative study is richly descriptive�� (page 8). As such, qualitative evaluation via focus groups is an important strategy to capture the views of the program implementers.

In the Project P.A.T.H.S. (Positive Adolescent Training through Holistic Social Programmes), the Tier 1 Program is a universal positive youth development program provided for secondary 1 to 3 students in Hong Kong. There were 52 schools that joined the experimental implementation phase (2005�C2008) and more than 200 schools that joined the full implementation phase (2006�C2009). Several studies have already Brefeldin_A documented the positive program effects based on the students’ objective and subjective outcomes collected from survey questionnaires [20�C22]. Qualitative evaluation has also been conducted in order to understand the program effects of the Project P.A.T.H.S. in Hong Kong based on the perspective of the program participants [23, 24]. The related findings were integrated and presented in another paper by Shek and Sun in this special issue. On the other hand, qualitative evaluation based on focus group methodology has been carried out in order to understand the views of the program implementers [25, 26]. Again, it is illuminating if an integration of the existing qualitative studies based on the program implementers can be carried out.