Research Methodology lecture 16 Andleeb Asmat Naturalistic Observation

Research Methodology lecture 16 Andleeb Asmat

Naturalistic Observation • Naturalistic observation studies, as their name implies, involve observing organisms in their natural settings. • For example, a researcher who wants to examine the socialization skills of children may observe them while they are at a school playground, and then record all instances of effective or ineffective social behavior. • The primary advantage of the naturalistic observation approach is that it takes place in a natural setting, where the participants do not realize that they are being observed. • Consequently, the behaviors that it measures and describes are likely to reflect the participants’ true behaviors.

• In general, naturalistic observation has four defining principals • The first and most fundamental principle is that of noninterference. Researchers who engage in naturalistic observation must not disrupt the natural course of events that they are observing. By adhering to this principle, researchers can observe events the way they truly happen. • Second, naturalistic observation involves the observation and detection of invariants, or behavior patterns or other phenomena that exist in the real world. For example, individuals may be found to engage in similar ways, on certain times or days, in certain contexts, or when in the company of certain people or groups.

• Third, the naturalistic observation approach is particularly useful for exploratory purposes, when we know little or nothing about a certain subject. • In this vein, naturalistic observation can provide a useful but global description of the participant and a series of events as opposed to isolated ones. • Finally, the naturalistic observation method is basically descriptive. Although it can provide a somewhat detailed description of a phenomenon, it cannot tell us why the phenomenon occurred.

Limitations • The main limitation of the naturalistic approach is that the researcher has no real control over the setting. • In the hypothetical study of children’s socialization skills, factors other than a child’s gender may be affecting the child’s social behavior, but the researcher may not be aware of those other factors. • In addition, participants may not have an opportunity to display the behaviors or phenomena the researcher is trying to observe because of factors that are beyond the researcher’s control. • For example, some of the children who are usually the most aggressive may not be at school that day or may instead be in detention because of previous misconduct, and thus they are not in the sample of children on the playground. • A final limitation is that the topics of study are limited to overt behavior. A researcher cannot study unobservable processes like attitudes or thoughts using a naturalistic observation study.