RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

18 Observation
Introduction
The distinctive feature of observation as a research
process is that it offers an investigator the
opportunity to gather ‘live’ data from naturally
occurring social situations. In this way, the researcher
can look directly at what is taking place
in situ rather than relying on second-hand accounts.
The use of immediate awareness, or direct
cognition, as a principal mode of research thus has
the potential to yield more valid or authentic data
than would otherwise be the case with mediated
or inferential methods. And this is observation’s
unique strength. There are other attractions in its
favour: as Robson (2002: 310) says, what people
do may differ from what they say they do, and
observation provides a reality check; observation
also enables a researcher to look afresh at everyday
behaviour that otherwise might be taken for
granted, expected or go unnoticed (Cooper and
Schindler 2001: 374); and the approach with its
carefully prepared recording schedules avoids problems
caused when there is a time gap between
the act of observation and the recording of the
event – selective or faulty memory, for example.
Finally, on a procedural point, some participants
may prefer the presence of an observer to an intrusive,
time-consuming interview or questionnaire.
Observation can be of facts,suchasthenumber
of books in a classroom, the number of students in
a class, the number of students who visit the
school library in a given period. It can also
focus on events as they happen in a classroom,
for example, the amount of teacher and student
talk, the amount of off-task conversation and the
amount of group collaborative work. Further, it
can focus on behaviours or qualities, such as the
friendliness of the teacher, the degree of aggressive
behaviour or the extent of unsociable behaviour
among students.
One can detect here a putative continuum
from the observation of uncontestable facts to
the researcher’s interpretation and judgement
of situations, which are then recorded as
observations. What counts as evidence becomes
cloudy immediately in observation, because what
we observe depends on when, where and for how
long we look, how many observers there are, and
how we look. It also depends on what is taken to be
evidence of, or a proxy for, an underlying, latent
construct. What counts as acceptable evidence
of unsociable behaviour in the example above
requires an operational definition that is valid and
reliable. Observers need to decide ‘of what is the
observation evidence’, for example: is the degree
of wear and tear on a book in the school library an
indication of its popularity, or carelessness by its
readers, or of destructive behaviour by students
One cannot infer cause from effect, intention from
observation, stimulus from response.
Observational data are sensitive to contexts and
demonstrate strong ecological validity (Moyles
2002). This enables researchers to understand
the context of programmes, to be open-ended
and inductive, to see things that might otherwise
be unconsciously missed, to discover things that
participants might not freely talk about in
interview situations, to move beyond perceptionbased
data (e.g. opinions in interviews) and
to access personal knowledge. Because observed
incidents are less predictable there is a certain
freshness to this form of data collection that is
often denied in other forms, e.g. a questionnaire
or a test.
Observations (Morrison 1993: 80) enable the
researcher to gather data on: