♥Psychological Investigations- Observations♥

Observations

Overall in psychology observations are used quite a lot. There is so many different varieties and procedures as to how you would carry out observations.

Participant Observations

♥ Participant observation can be both Overt and Covert, these are observations made by someone who is also participating in the activity which could affect the objectivity. 

♥ Overt Participant Observation is where participants are aware that you are observing them. This is a positive as it allows the researcher to gain the consent of the participants  and allows the researcher to really understand group traits and cause and effect relationships which produces rich data. However, this can create objectivity which basically mean its very much one sided as researcher is a part of the group they can't just tell us what they see from a perspective that everyone would see.

♥Covert Participant Observation is when the participants aren't aware that you're observing them. This increases reliability and validity as behaviours are more naturalistic. However social desirability may still occur and also participants did not give you their consent to be observed which creates an ethical issue ,

♥Non-Participant Observations are observations made by someone who is not participating in the activity observed. These are a positive as they allow  the observer to be very objective so all observers may get the same results which increases the observer Inter Rater Reliability (this is a way of describing how well independent observers score on the findings and  the extent to which the findings correlate - so in simpler terms how well the researchers have gathered their results and if at all there's any similarities in their findings.) Also you can record these observations which later allow you to pick out anything that you may have missed. Although NPO can be great they cant really establish a cause and effect relationship and you can also miss informations along the way.

Structured and Unstructured Observations

♥ Structured observations are ones where the researchers create a type of coding scheme to record the participants data which can collect quantitative data which is easy to analyse. Coding Schemes are ways of categorising behaviour so that you can code what you observe in order of how often a type of behaviour appears. This  type of information is a easy to carry out however as its categorised it is a restricted view and is not very in-depth so you cant find cause and effect relationships between behaviours.

♥ Unstructured Observations are ones where the researcher records all the behaviour that is observed. This type of observation can be difficult to carry out without the use of recording equipment as it is easy to miss behaviours. This type of data is difficult to analyse however it does provide rich quantitative data.

Sampling Observational Data.

♥Sometimes researchers may use a sampling technique to collect their data as it may be difficult to record everything; these techniques are Event and Time Sampling.

♥Event Sampling is where the observer records any significant behaviour that happens during the observation period, such as ticking a box every time you would see people talk in class when the teachers talking. Although behaviours should not be missed, if there is to many observations happening at once not all behaviours may be recorded.

♥ Time Sampling is where the researchers pick a set time frame in which they would record behaviours seen. This method can be problematic as researchers cant see all the behaviours happening at anyone time, which can be unrepresentative of the group being observed.

As always thank you for reading if there's anything that you would like to know in particular please let me know and do not hesitate to get in touch information is all down below.

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Hi to you my Psychology Friends or people interested in psychology. Everything mentioned in this post is from the AS Psychology OCR Specification. For any more information about this course please go on to the OCR website and I Hope you enjoyed reading and revising. If you have further questions please do not hesitate to leave a comment down below or get in touch with me on twitter: @MissSweetlyNat or on Facebook: http://facebook.com/MissSweetlyNat or just type in Miss Sweetly Nat in the search bar.

Thanks

Nat♥