RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

EXAMPLES OF KINDS OF CASE STUDY 259
of a small group of working-class boys during
their last two years at school and their first
months in employment, Willis (1977) attended
all the different subject classes at school – ‘not
as a teacher, but as a member of the class’ – and
worked alongside each boy in industry for a short
period (see http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/
9780415368780 – Chapter 11, file 11.7. ppt).
Non-participant observers, on the other hand,
stand aloof from the group activities they are
investigating and eschew group membership – no
great difficulty for King (1979), an adult observer
in infant classrooms. King (1979) recalls how
he firmly established his non-participant status
with young children by recognizing that they
regarded any adult as another teacher or surrogate
teacher. Hence he would stand up to maintain
social distance, and deliberately decline to show
immediate interest, and avoided eye contact.
The best illustration of the non-participant
observer role is perhaps the case of the researcher
sitting at the back of a classroom coding up
every three seconds the verbal exchanges between
teacher and pupils by means of a structured set of
observational categories.
Often the type of observation undertaken by
the researcher is associated with the type of setting
in which the research takes place. In Box 11.3
we identify a continuum of settings ranging from
the ‘artificial’ environments of the counsellor’s
and the therapist’s clinics (cells 5 and 6) to
the ‘natural’ environments of school classrooms,
staffrooms and playgrounds (cells 1 and 2). Because
our continuum is crude and arbitrary we are
at liberty to locate studies of an information
technology audit and computer usage (cells 3
and 4) somewhere between the ‘artificial’ and
the ‘natural’ poles.
Although in theory each of the six examples
of case studies in Box 11.3 could have been
undertaken either as a participant or as a nonparticipant
observation study, a number of factors
intrude to make one or other of the observational
strategies the dominant mode of inquiry in a
particular type of setting. Bailey (1994: 247)
explains that it is hard for a researcher who
wishes to undertake covert research not to act
as a participant in a natural setting, as, if the
researcher does not appear to be participating,
then why is he/she there Hence, in many natural
settings the researchers will be participants. This
is in contrast to laboratory or artificial settings, in
which non-participant observation (e.g. through
video recording) may take place.
What we are saying is that the unstructured,
ethnographic account of teachers’ work (cell 1)
Chapter 11
Box 11.3
Atypologyofobservationstudies
Degree of
structure
imposed
by observer
Unstructured
1
Natural
Acker (1990) ‘Teachers’
culture in an English
primary school’
Degree of structure in the observational setting
3
Wild et al.
(1992) ‘Evaluating information
technology’
5
Artificial
Antonsen (1988) ‘Treatment
of a boy of twelve’
Structured
2
Boulton (1992) ‘Participation
in playground activities’
4
Blease and Cohen (1990)
‘Coping with computers’
6
Houghton (1991) ‘Mr Chong:
a case study of a dependent
learner’
Source:adaptedfromBailey1978