Budget a research focus group session.
Focus group budgets have three components with different drivers. Incentives scale with total participants, venue and catering scale with the number of sessions, and transcription scales with recorded hours — about ninety minutes per group. Transcription is the line most often forgotten and can rival the incentive budget, since professional transcription of multi-speaker audio is priced well above single-speaker interviews.
Cost components
Total = participants x incentive + groups x venue and catering + audio hours x transcription rate
Per-participant cost
Cost per participant = total cost / total participants
Three to four groups per distinct segment is a common convention, on the basis that new themes stop emerging by then. Fewer risks missing variation, more adds cost without much new information.
Overlapping speech, speaker identification and crosstalk slow transcription substantially — often two to three times slower per audio minute than a single-speaker interview.