Abstract
Online focus groups (OFGs) in health research allow researchers to gain insight into sensitive health topics, reach people with disabilities, and overcome geographic, physical, and medical limitations in data collection. The OFGs can be held synchronously in real time with all participants online simultaneously, or asynchronously, enabling participants to join at their convenience. In this article, we compare OFGs with face-to-face focus groups in nutrition and health-related research with respect to administration and data quality retrieval. As part of a multistate research project on assessment of the nutrition environment for older adults that used OFGs, the researchers' firsthand review experience and lessons learned are discussed.