Editor's note: George Silverman, president of Market Navigation, Inc., Orangeburg, N.Y., is a completely recovered and reformed psychologist.

It's been almost 25 years, and over 5,000 groups, since I invented the telephone focus group and developed it into a viable research tool. This qualitative issue of Quirk's Marketing Research Review is an appropriate place to report on its present status and current applications.In case you're unfamiliar with them, telephone focus groups are interactive group interviews that take place over a specially designed telephone conference system. Typically, about seven to 10 participants are in all-way interaction, just as if they were in a face-to-face focus group. In this case, however, they are all on their own telephones, usually at home in the evening. (This is not a group of people around a speaker phone. Everyone is in a different location.)

When people initially try telephone focus groups, they usually do so not for the reduced role-playing, and greater openness and interaction these groups provide. In fact, they are - understandably -skeptical about group dynamics over the telephone. What they are usually looking for is access to people who are otherwise difficult or impossible to recruit.In every product category there are leveraged influencers, prescribers and approvers, like editors, physicians, engineers, industry gurus, innovators, etc. They may be very difficult to get into face-to- face groups, either because they are too busy (particularly if they have to travel), or they don't want to talk openly (particularly with people from their own region). There are also people up the distribution chain, like store clerks, managers, owners, wholesalers, jobbers, distributors, buyers, etc., who are usually unwilling to talk with people down the block.Leveraged influencers can be members of Congress, Nobel Prize-winning economists, Fortune 100 company presidents, pre...