They tend to result in engaging and insightful narrative accounts of the thing that is being studied, albeit the problem that such methods do not easily lend themselves to replication. Such methods are usually associated with the collection and analysis of qualitative data. In participant observation, researchers aim to become members of a social group, within a particular setting, with a view to observing that group, holistically, ‘from within’.įor example, the famous study by Rosenhan (1973) saw researchers getting themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals as patients, so that they could covertly observe what was going on as members of the institution that they had set out to study. Participant observation is one particular tradition of inquiry that tends to draw on unstructured observations. When we talk of unstructured observational methods we are generally referring to research methods that involve observing a social setting, an institution, an organisation, a ‘case’, or such like, with a view to writing a richly detailed account of the observed thing. But when we talk about ‘observational methods’ we are really referring to a set of methods that are, more literally, based on watching (and listening to) things that happen, and recording stuff about those things.īroadly speaking, and purely for the purposes of explanation, it can be helpful to divide the world of observational methods into two camps: unstructured and structured. We observe the answers that our participants give on our questionnaires, the responses of interviewees to our semi-structured interviews, and the performances of participants in our experiments (the dependent variable is often measured by observation). It refers to any means of gathering data about the world around us, including by means of specialist equipment that enables us to ‘observe’ the furthest reaches of the universe or to ‘observe’ the behaviour of neurons in the human brain.Īll research in psychology is, by definition, based on observation. In this sense, ‘observation’ is not the same as ‘looking at things’. All sciences are based on observation, in the broadest sense of the term.
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