Abstract: The article analyzes the potential of such empirical methods of pedagogical research as questioning, the most widely used method, and the method of focus groups, which is relatively new. The author studies the example of verifying the results of questioning for the assessment of the development of aesthetic culture of law enforcement officers. The author explains the understanding of questioning as one of effective quantitative methods of pedagogical research, describes the experience of using questioning among 146 law enforcement officers in different regions aimed at studying the development of their aesthetic culture. Simultaneously, the author analyzes the potential of using the quantitative method of focus groups which gives the opportunity to get full and complex information during the discussion and direct contact of the interviewer with interviewees. The results of the questioning are compared with the results of focus groups. The article contains a description of the experience of using focus groups for studying the development of aesthetic culture of law enforcement officers; the author describes the process of preparation and organization of the focus-group study, its stages and their content. The author comes to the conclusion that the method of focused interview can be used in pedagogical research in order to increase its effectiveness and specify the qualitative aspects which can’t be studied via other empirical methods. This method helped to reveal such phenomena as “need-motivation” component and “active-creative” component, which were not mentioned during questioning in the interpretation of the notion of “aesthetic culture of law enforcement officers”.