RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

408 OBSERVATION
nothing can give better insight into the life of a
gang of juvenile delinquents than going to live
with them for an extended period of time, critics
of participant observation studies will point to the
dangers of ‘going native’ as a result of playing a
role within such a group. How do we know that
observers do not lose their perspective and become
blind to the peculiarities that they are supposed to
be investigating
Adler and Adler (1994: 380) suggest several
stages in an observation. Commencing with the
selection of a setting on which to focus, the
observer then seeks a means of gaining entry
to the situation (for example, taking on a role
in it). Having gained entry the observer can
then commence the observation proper, be it
structured or unstructured, focused or unfocused.
If quantitative observation is being used then
data are gathered to be analysed post hoc; if
more ethnographic techniques are being used
then progressive focusing requires the observer to
undertake analysis during the period of observation
itself (discussed earlier).
The question that researchers frequently ask is
‘How much observation should I do’ or ‘When
do I stop observation’ Of course, there is no hard
and fast rule here, although it may be appropriate
to stop when ‘theoretical saturation’ has been
reached (Adler and Adler 1994: 380), i.e. when
the situations that are being observed appear to be
repeating data that have already been collected. Of
course, it may be important to carry on collecting
data at this point, to indicate overall frequencies
of observed behaviour, enabling the researcher to
find the most to the least common behaviours
observed over time. Further, the greater the
number of observations, the greater the reliability
of the data might be, enabling emergent categories
to be verified. What is being addressed here is
the reliability of the observations (see the earlier
discussion of triangulation).
Natural and artificial settings for
observation
Most observations by educational researchers
will be undertaken in natural settings: schools,
classrooms, playgrounds, lessons and suchlike.
In studies of a psychological flavour it may be
that a contrived, artificial setting is set up in
order to give greater observational power to the
observers. In Chapter 21 we describe two classic
studies in the field of social psychology, both of
which use contrived settings – the Milgram study
of obedience and the Stanford Prison experiment.
Similarly psychological researchers may wish to
construct a classroom with a one-way mirror in
order to observe children’s behaviour without the
presence of the observer. This raises the ethical
issue of overt and covert research. The advantage
of a contrived, artificial setting is the degree of
control that the researcher can exert over the
situation – typically as large a degree of control as
in a laboratory experiment. To the charge that
this is an unrealistic situation and that humans
should neither be controlled nor manipulated, we
refer the reader to the ethical issues addressed in
Chapter 2.
One can place settings for observation along a
continuum from structured to unstructured and
from natural to artificial (Box 18.3). Settings
may be classified by the degree of structure
that is imposed on the environment by the
observer/researcher, and by the degree of structure
inherent in the environment itself (Cooper and
Schindler 2001: 378).
Clearly the researcher will need to be guided
by the notion of ‘fitness for purpose’ in the
type of setting and the amount of structure
imposed. There is fuzziness between the boundaries
here. Structured settings may be useful in testing
hypotheses while unstructured settings may be
useful for generating hypotheses.
Ethical considerations
Although observation frequently claims neutrality
by being non-interventionist, there are several
ethical considerations that surround it. There is
awell-documentedliteratureonthedilemmasurrounding
overt and covert observation. Whereas
in overt research the subjects know that they are
being observed, in covert research they do not.
On the one hand, this latter form of research