RM: Observational design Flashcards
(16 cards)
In addition to being overt/covert, naturalistic/controlled and participant/non-participant, what else can observational studies be?
Structured
or
Unstructured
What happens in unstructured observations?
The observer records all the relevant behaviour, but has no system.
The observer attempts to record everything they see.
What are issues with using unstructured observations?
- There may be too much to record
- Behaviours recorded are more likely to be those which are most visible/eye-catching to the observer, but they may not be the most relevant or important
Why might a researcher choose to use unstructured observations, despite the issues with it?
For research that has not yet been conducted before.
It acts as a kind of pilot study to get an idea of the behaviours that they could record in a structured system.
What is a structured observation?
When a researcher uses various systems to organise observations, such as behavioural categories and sampling procedures.
Why is it preferable to use structured observations?
To help to ensure your observational techniques are objective and rigorous (extremely thorough and careful).
What are the two main ways to structure observation?
By using behavioural categories and sampling procedures.
Behavioural categories and sampling procedures are examples of what?
Structured observations.
What is one of the hardest aspects of the observational method?
Why is this?
Deciding how different behaviours should be categorised.
This is because our perception of behaviour is often seamless; when we observe something we see a continuous stream of action rather than a series of seperate behavioural components.
In order to conduct systematic observations, a researcher must do what?
- Break up the stream of behaviour into different behavioural categories.
- This is done through operationalisation- breaking the behaviour being studied into a set of components.
- Eg. infant behaviour is broken done into crying, smiling, laughing.*
Behaviour categories should have three characteristics. What are these?
- should be objective
- should cover all possible component behaviours
- should be mutually exclusive
What do we mean when we say a behavioural category should be objective?
The observer should not have to make any inferences about the behaviour, but should just record explicit actions.
What do we mean when we say a behavioural category should be mutually exclusive?
Each category should be distinct and there should be no overlap; you should not have to mark two categories at once.
Eg. rather than marking one ‘smiling’ box and one ‘laughing’ box, you should have and ‘smiling+laughing’ box to mark.
When might using unstructured observation be useful?
When the behaviour of interest does not occur very often.
What is event sampling?
An observational technique in which a count is kept of the number of times a certain behaviour (event) occurs in an individual/individuals.
Eg. counting how many times a person smiles in a 10 minute period.
What is time sampling?
An observational technique in which the observer records behaviours at set intervals.
Eg. noting what a target individual is doing every 15 seconds. The observer may select one or more behavioural categories to tick at this time interval.
