Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Direct and Indirect Observation 435
cleaning children, or nursing. The CM data showed that women were interrupted
in their productive activities 36% of their waiting time (that is, 36% of
82%, or 30% of their entire day) and that the interruptions were as likely to
be responding to their children’s needs as they were to be selling to tourists.
Pluses and Minuses of Direct Observation
On balance, direct observation provides much more accurate results about
behavior than do reports of behavior. Ricci et al. (1995) studied 40 people in
Kalama, a peri-urban village about 15 miles north of Cairo. One day, a set of
trained observers watched the 40 participants for 2.5 hours. The observers
noted whether people were engaged in any of 17 activities and how long each
person spent at each activity.
The next day, the participants were asked to recall, sequentially, what they
had done the entire day before, and how long they had spent at each activity.
The interviewers did not mention any of the 17 activities, but they tried to
improve respondent recall by asking about activities before and after locally
significant time markers, like call to prayer. Ten of the 40 were toddlers, so
Ricci et al. focused on the recall data of the 24 adults and the six school-age
children.
Ricci et al. were very forgiving in their analysis. Informants were scored as
being correct if they could recall an activity at all and say correctly whether it
had been done in the morning or afternoon observation period (9:00–11:30
a.m. or 12:30–3:00 p.m.). Ricci et al. scored only errors of omission (leaving
out activities) and threw out errors of commission (inventing activities that
had not been observed).
And informants still got it wrong—a lot. Across men and women, across
agricultural and nonagricultural households, informants got it wrong, on average,
56% of the time. Five of the six women who had been observed breastfeeding
failed to report that activity the next day; 13 of the 15 women who
had been observed washing clothes failed to report that activity the next day.
If you want to know whether, say, caring for animals happens more often
than, say, gathering fuel, then self-reports might be enough. But if you want
to know how often those behaviors actually occur, then nothing short of direct
observation will do.
I don’t want to give the impression, however, that direct observation data
are automatically accurate. Lots of things can clobber the accuracy of directly
observed behavior. Observers may be biased by their own expectations of
what they are looking for or by expectations about the behavior of women or
men or any ethnic group (Kent et al. 1977; Repp et al. 1988).