Participant observation

Question 1

What is a participant observation?

Answer 1

Where the researcher takes part in the event or everyday life of group while observing it - overt or covert and produces primary qualitative data as collected by sociologists for their own purpose.

Question 2

Practical advantage - investigating pupils exclusions

Answer 2

• Opportunity to build a rapport with students and gain their trust - useful to study ‘outsider’ groups such as pupils at risk of exclusion or who have been excluded - the rapport can give the researcher an insight on the peoples way of life, that meanings, viewpoint and the values and problems leading to valid and authentic data.
• Lewis Yablonsky (1973) points teenage gang is likely to see research has he come with questionnaires as the unwelcome representatives of authority this can also be applied to excluded peoples as they too are likely to reject.

Question 3

Practical disadvantage - investigating pupils exclusion

Answer 3

• Can only study fairly small groups - unrepresentative, cannot be generalised to wider population of pupils exclusions at all schools in UK.
• Downes & Rock all those up, an observation may provide valid insight into the group being studied, It is doubtful how far these ‘internally valid’ insights or ‘externally valid’ or generalisable.

Question 4

Ethical advantage - investigating pupils exclusion

Answer 4

• An overt participant observation avoids ethical problems of obtaining information by deceit - pupil exclusions are a sensitive topic and would be wrong to deceive pupils in order to gain information.

Question 5

Ethical disadvantage - investigating pupils exclusion

Answer 5

• Usually has to be overt due to pupils greater vulnerability and limited ability to give informed consent.
• Delamont points out that every observer in a school sees and hear things that could get pupils into trouble and what to do with this ‘guilty information’ is an ethical issue.
• Delamont also notes additional care should be taken to protect identities of pupils, teachers and school.

Question 6

Interpretivists (advantage) - investigating pupils exclusion

Answer 6

• High validity as it gives an authentic understanding of the worldviews of pupils - favour these unstructured participant observations.
• Interactionists favour as we gain information on micro-level interactions and meanings at first hand, however, power difference between young an adults is a major barrier to real attitudes and behaviour of pupil, swell as language differences which could affect validity.
• Hawthorne effect - researchers presence mat influence the behavior of the people being observed, e.g. pupils at risk of exclusion may behave better in front of the researcher than they would normally.
• Ball (1993) highlights to that the children’s awareness of kings presence may have changed their normal behavior, and so undermined the validity.

Question 7

Positivists (disadvantages) - investigating pupils exclusion

Answer 7

• Unlikely to produce representative data and lack reliability as data recorded is unsystematic and hard to replicate.
• Lack of structure as results cannot be quantified.