Editor's note: Joan Lawton is director of operations at Erlich Transcultural Consultants, Woodland Hills, Calif.

Summer is an interesting season for a market research firm. A company can be relatively quiet and have an opportunity to catch up on hibernating administrative issues or it can be wildly busy. Such was the summer when our firm, Erlich Transcultural Consultants (ETC), Woodland Hills, Calif., handled a complex project for the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Westat, Inc., a Rockville, Md., research firm.

Westat approached ETC wanting to know if we did multicultural work. If so, could we conduct a study among people who have diabetes and who belong to the following ethnic groups: Hispanic, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin-speakers), African-American and Native American? Could we recruit participants from primarily low-income metropolitan areas? Could we conduct the groups in-language? Did we have simultaneous interpreters for each language? Could we coordinate a study in Los Angeles that took place not only in professional facilities throughout the country but also in a rural Georgia community center? Did we have moderators for focus groups with Native Americans?

Since the answer to nearly every question was yes, we began to juggle the schedules of facilities, moderators, interpreters, translators, a Westat project director and an ETC project director. Once a confirmed schedule was in place, we attacked the problem of recruiting. All the respondents had to be one of the appropriate ethnicities, had to have Type II (adult onset) diabetes, had to be 40-70 years old and low- (under $20K/year) or middle- ($20K-$50K/year) income, and could not have checked their blood glucose level in the 24-hour period prior to the recruitment call.

How did we find these people? Certainly not by any traditional methods. We were in constant contact with community centers, churches, neighborhood pharmacists, various state and city departments of health, hospitals, universities and a maze of personal and professional contacts. Flyers were distributed by some very cooperative health care professionals who worked at clinics that service the ethnic populations we were seeking. Some clinic personnel personally invited their clients to attend the groups. Some respondents were generated by posting notices at senior centers. All information from the flyers (in all cities) was sent to the ETC office and then relayed to the recruiters. In Los Angeles, some of our recruiters simply made calls from their databases with hopes of finding appropriate participants. This method was only somewhat successful.
When the groups were finally recruited, we faced the problem of refreshments at the research sites. We couldn't feed these respondents submarine sandwiches, M&Ms and gummy bears. All the facilities we dealt with were cooperative and provided sugar-free, low-fat snacks along with the traditional respondent fare so that participants would be able to make healthy choices and would not feel pressured to eat only the "right" foods.

Our client, Westat, assisted with logistics in rural Georgia and on the Native American reservations.

When it came time to determine who would moderate the Native American groups, the CDC agreed, at the suggestion of the Indian Health Service, that ETC President Andrew Erlich should train four Native American undergraduate students to moderate the groups for their own and other tribes. ETC created an intensive training program, taught it at the University of Montana in Missoula, and generated four moderators, who, along with the Westat and ETC project directors and a representative from the CDC, eventually traveled to Minneapolis and to reservations in Missoula and Lame Deer, Mont., Riverton, Wyo., and near the Canada-Montana border. They conducted groups with Shoshone, Northern Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Flathead, Chippewa and Arapaho tribe members.

The comprehensive moderator training program, based on ETC's in-house moderator development program, included training in the understanding of group dynamics and communication, listening skills, conceptualizing the focus group process, screener and discussion guide design, probing, dealing with difficult respondents, focus group protocols and both analysis and report writing.

These groups were difficult to arrange, as all details and requests had to be approved by various tribal councils, some of which only meet once a month, and had to be scheduled around pow-wows and other activities. Another issue to be resolved was any discussion of traditional healing remedies, which participants said were sacred to them and not to be shared.

Another significant issue in the Native American groups was the possibility of interrupting a respondent in order to move on to a different subject. The Native American moderators explained that interrupting, even to change topics, was considered to be a sign of disrespect, especially when a younger person interrupted an older person. Interruptions had to be very infrequent and had to be handled with delicacy and diplomacy, even more diplomacy than is required in Asian groups, where the elderly are revered and cherished.

When the entire project was done, ETC had conducted 27 groups in seven languages in 11 locations among seven different ethnic groups, trained four Native American moderators, achieved professional satisfaction and uncovered a wealth of information for Westat and the CDC.

Are there marketing implications from this study? Absolutely. If there is a difficult and complex marketing research problem, don't simplify it - at least not too much. Be flexible, creative, and approach it head-on.