What Is Observational Research?

The term observational research is used to refer to several different types of non-
experimental studies in which behavior is systematically observed and recorded.
The goal of observational research is to describe a variable or set of variables.
More generally, the goal is to obtain a snapshot of specific characteristics of an
individual, group, or setting. As described previously, observational research is
non-experimental because nothing is manipulated or controlled, and as such we
cannot arrive at causal conclusions using this approach. The data that are collected
in observational research studies are often qualitative in nature but they may also
be quantitative or both (mixed-methods). There are several different types of
observational methods that will be described below.

Naturalistic Observation
Naturalistic observation is an observational method that involves observing
people’s behavior in the environment in which it typically occurs. Thus naturalistic
observation is a type of field research (as opposed to a type of laboratory research).
Jane Goodall’s famous research on chimpanzees is a classic example of naturalistic
observation. Dr. Goodall spent three decades observing chimpanzees in their
natural environment in East Africa. She examined such things as chimpanzee’s
social structure, mating patterns, gender roles, family structure, and care of
offspring by observing them in the wild. However, naturalistic observation could
more simply involve observing shoppers in a grocery store, children on a school
playground, or psychiatric inpatients in their wards. Researchers engaged in
naturalistic observation usually make their observations as unobtrusively as
possible so that participants are not aware that they are being studied. Such an
approach is called disguised naturalistic observation. Ethically, this method is
considered to be acceptable if the participants remain anonymous and the behavior
occurs in a public setting where people would not normally have an expectation of
privacy. Grocery shoppers putting items into their shopping carts, for example, are
engaged in public behavior that is easily observable by store employees and other
shoppers. For this reason, most researchers would consider it ethically acceptable
to observe them for a study. On the other hand, one of the arguments against the
ethicality of the naturalistic observation of “bathroom behavior” discussed earlier
in the book is that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy even in a public
restroom and that this expectation was violated.

In cases where it is not ethical or practical to conduct disguised naturalistic

observation, researchers can conduct undisguised naturalistic observation where
the participants are made aware of the researcher presence and monitoring of their
behavior. However, one concern with undisguised naturalistic observation
is reactivity. Reactivity refers to when a measure changes participants’ behavior.
In the case of undisguised naturalistic observation, the concern with reactivity is
that when people know they are being observed and studied, they may act
differently than they normally would. This type of reactivity is known as
the Hawthorne effect. For instance, you may act much differently in a bar if you
know that someone is observing you and recording your behaviors and this would
invalidate the study. So disguised observation is less reactive and therefore can
have higher validity because people are not aware that their behaviors are being
observed and recorded. However, we now know that people often become used to
being observed and with time they begin to behave naturally in the researcher’s
presence. In other words, over time people habituate to being observed. Think
about reality shows like Big Brother or Survivor where people are constantly being
observed and recorded. While they may be on their best behavior at first, in a fairly
short amount of time they are flirting, having sex, wearing next to nothing,
screaming at each other, and occasionally behaving in ways that are embarrassing.

Participant Observation
Another approach to data collection in observational research is participant
observation. In participant observation, researchers become active participants in
the group or situation they are studying. Participant observation is very similar to
naturalistic observation in that it involves observing people’s behavior in the
environment in which it typically occurs. As with naturalistic observation, the data
that are collected can include interviews (usually unstructured), notes based on
their observations and interactions, documents, photographs, and other artifacts.
The only difference between naturalistic observation and participant observation is
that researchers engaged in participant observation become active members of the
group or situations they are studying. The basic rationale for participant
observation is that there may be important information that is only accessible to, or
can be interpreted only by, someone who is an active participant in the group or
situation. Like naturalistic observation, participant observation can be
either disguised or undisguised. In disguised participant observation, the
researchers pretend to be members of the social group they are observing and
conceal their true identity as researchers.

In a famous example of disguised participant observation, Leon Festinger and his

colleagues infiltrated a doomsday cult known as the Seekers, whose members
believed that the apocalypse would occur on December 21, 1954. Interested in
studying how members of the group would cope psychologically when the
prophecy inevitably failed, they carefully recorded the events and reactions of the
cult members in the days before and after the supposed end of the world.
Unsurprisingly, the cult members did not give up their belief but instead convinced
themselves that it was their faith and efforts that saved the world from destruction.
Festinger and his colleagues later published a book about this experience, which
they used to illustrate the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, Riecken, &
Schachter, 1956)[1].

In contrast with undisguised participant observation, the researchers become a

part of the group they are studying and they disclose their true identity as
researchers to the group under investigation. Once again there are important ethical
issues to consider with disguised participant observation. First no informed consent
can be obtained and second deception is being used. The researcher is deceiving
the participants by intentionally withholding information about their motivations
for being a part of the social group they are studying. But sometimes disguised
participation is the only way to access a protective group (like a cult).
Further, disguised participant observation is less prone to reactivity than
undisguised participant observation.

Rosenhan’s study (1973)[2] of the experience of people in a psychiatric ward would

be considered disguised participant observation because Rosenhan and his
pseudopatients were admitted into psychiatric hospitals on the pretense of being
patients so that they could observe the way that psychiatric patients are treated by
staff. The staff and other patients were unaware of their true identities as
researchers.

Another example of participant observation comes from a study by sociologist

Amy Wilkins on a university-based religious organization that emphasized how
happy its members were (Wilkins, 2008)[3]. Wilkins spent 12 months attending and
participating in the group’s meetings and social events, and she interviewed several
group members. In her study, Wilkins identified several ways in which the group
“enforced” happiness—for example, by continually talking about happiness,
discouraging the expression of negative emotions, and using happiness as a way to
distinguish themselves from other groups.

One of the primary benefits of participant observation is that the researchers are in
a much better position to understand the viewpoint and experiences of the people
they are studying when they are a part of the social group. The primary limitation
with this approach is that the mere presence of the observer could affect the
behavior of the people being observed. While this is also a concern with
naturalistic observation, additional concerns arise when researchers become active
members of the social group they are studying because that they may change the
social dynamics and/or influence the behavior of the people they are studying.
Similarly, if the researcher acts as a participant observer there can be concerns with
biases resulting from developing relationships with the participants. Concretely,
the researcher may become less objective resulting in more experimenter bias.
Structured Observation
Another observational method is structured observation. Here the investigator
makes careful observations of one or more specific behaviors in a particular setting
that is more structured than the settings used in naturalistic or participant
observation. Often the setting in which the observations are made is not the natural
setting. Instead, the researcher may observe people in the laboratory environment.
Alternatively, the researcher may observe people in a natural setting (like a
classroom setting) that they have structured some way, for instance by introducing
some specific task participants are to engage in or by introducing a specific social
situation or manipulation.

Structured observation is very similar to naturalistic observation and participant

observation in that in all three cases researchers are observing naturally occurring
behavior; however, the emphasis in structured observation is on gathering
quantitative rather than qualitative data. Researchers using this approach are
interested in a limited set of behaviors. This allows them to quantify the behaviors
they are observing. In other words, structured observation is less global than
naturalistic or participant observation because the researcher engaged in structured
observations is interested in a small number of specific behaviors. Therefore, rather
than recording everything that happens, the researcher only focuses on very
specific behaviors of interest.

Researchers Robert Levine and Ara Norenzayan used structured observation to

study differences in the “pace of life” across countries (Levine & Norenzayan,
1999)[4]. One of their measures involved observing pedestrians in a large city to see
how long it took them to walk 60 feet. They found that people in some countries
walked reliably faster than people in other countries. For example, people in
Canada and Sweden covered 60 feet in just under 13 seconds on average, while
people in Brazil and Romania took close to 17 seconds. When structured
observation takes place in the complex and even chaotic “real world,” the
questions of when, where, and under what conditions the observations will be
made, and who exactly will be observed are important to consider. Levine and
Norenzayan described their sampling process as follows:

“Male and female walking speed over a distance of 60 feet was measured in at
least two locations in main downtown areas in each city. Measurements were taken
during main business hours on clear summer days. All locations were flat,
unobstructed, had broad sidewalks, and were sufficiently uncrowded to allow
pedestrians to move at potentially maximum speeds. To control for the effects of
socializing, only pedestrians walking alone were used. Children, individuals with
obvious physical handicaps, and window-shoppers were not timed. Thirty-five men
and 35 women were timed in most cities.” (p. 186).
Precise specification of the sampling process in this way makes data collection
manageable for the observers, and it also provides some control over important
extraneous variables. For example, by making their observations on clear summer
days in all countries, Levine and Norenzayan controlled for effects of the weather
on people’s walking speeds. In Levine and Norenzayan’s study, measurement was
relatively straightforward. They simply measured out a 60-foot distance along a
city sidewalk and then used a stopwatch to time participants as they walked over
that distance.

As another example, researchers Robert Kraut and Robert Johnston wanted to

study bowlers’ reactions to their shots, both when they were facing the pins and
then when they turned toward their companions (Kraut & Johnston, 1979)[5]. But
what “reactions” should they observe? Based on previous research and their own
pilot testing, Kraut and Johnston created a list of reactions that included “closed
smile,” “open smile,” “laugh,” “neutral face,” “look down,” “look away,” and
“face cover” (covering one’s face with one’s hands). The observers committed this
list to memory and then practiced by coding the reactions of bowlers who had been
videotaped. During the actual study, the observers spoke into an audio recorder,
describing the reactions they observed. Among the most interesting results of this
study was that bowlers rarely smiled while they still faced the pins. They were
much more likely to smile after they turned toward their companions, suggesting
that smiling is not purely an expression of happiness but also a form of social
communication.

In yet another example (this one in a laboratory environment), Dov Cohen and his
colleagues had observers rate the emotional reactions of participants who had just
been deliberately bumped and insulted by a confederate after they dropped off a
completed questionnaire at the end of a hallway. The confederate was posing as
someone who worked in the same building and who was frustrated by having to
close a file drawer twice in order to permit the participants to walk past them (first
to drop off the questionnaire at the end of the hallway and once again on their way
back to the room where they believed the study they signed up for was taking
place). The two observers were positioned at different ends of the hallway so that
they could read the participants’ body language and hear anything they might say.
Interestingly, the researchers hypothesized that participants from the southern
United States, which is one of several places in the world that has a “culture of
honor,” would react with more aggression than participants from the northern
United States, a prediction that was in fact supported by the observational data
(Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz, 1996)[6].

When the observations require a judgment on the part of the observers—as in the
studies by Kraut and Johnston and Cohen and his colleagues—a process referred to
as coding is typically required. Coding generally requires clearly defining a set of
target behaviors. The observers then categorize participants individually in terms
of which behavior they have engaged in and the number of times they engaged in
each behavior. The observers might even record the duration of each behavior. The
target behaviors must be defined in such a way that guides different observers to
code them in the same way. This difficulty with coding illustrates the issue of
interrater reliability, as mentioned in Chapter 4. Researchers are expected to
demonstrate the interrater reliability of their coding procedure by having multiple
raters code the same behaviors independently and then showing that the different
observers are in close agreement. Kraut and Johnston, for example, video recorded
a subset of their participants’ reactions and had two observers independently code
them. The two observers showed that they agreed on the reactions that were
exhibited 97% of the time, indicating good interrater reliability.

One of the primary benefits of structured observation is that it is far more efficient
than naturalistic and participant observation. Since the researchers are focused on
specific behaviors this reduces time and expense. Also, often times the
environment is structured to encourage the behaviors of interest which again means
that researchers do not have to invest as much time in waiting for the behaviors of
interest to naturally occur. Finally, researchers using this approach can clearly
exert greater control over the environment. However, when researchers exert more
control over the environment it may make the environment less natural which
decreases external validity. It is less clear for instance whether structured
observations made in a laboratory environment will generalize to a real world
environment. Furthermore, since researchers engaged in structured observation are
often not disguised there may be more concerns with reactivity