RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

21 Role-playing
Introduction
Much current discussion of role-playing has
occurred within the context of a protracted debate
over the use of deception in experimental social
psychology. Inevitably therefore, the following
account of role-playing as a research tool involves
some detailed comment on the ‘deception’ versus
‘honesty’ controversy. But role-playing has a
much longer history of use in the social sciences
than as a substitute for deceit. It has been
employed for decades in assessing personality, in
business training and in psychotherapy (Ginsburg
1978). 1 In this latter connection, role-playing was
introduced to the United States as a therapeutic
procedure by Jacob Moreno in the 1930s. His
group therapy sessions were called ‘psychodrama’,
and in various forms they spread to the group
dynamics movement which was developing in the
United States in the 1950s. Current interest in
encounter sessions and sensitivity training can be
traced back to the impact of Moreno’s pioneering
work in role-taking and role-enactment.
The focus of this chapter is on the use of roleplaying
as a technique of educational research,
and on simulations. Role-playing is defined as
participation in simulated social situations that
are intended to throw light upon the role/rule
contexts governing ‘real life’ social episodes. The
present discussion aims to extend some of the ideas
set out in Chapter 17 which dealt with account
gathering and analysis. We begin by itemizing a
number of role-playing methods that have been
reported in the literature.
Various role-play methods have been identified
by Hamilton (1976) and differentiated in terms of
apassive–activedistinction.Thus,anindividual
may role-play merely by reading a description of
a social episode and filling in a questionnaire
about it; on the other hand, a person may
role-play by being required to improvise a
characterization and perform it in front of
an audience. This passive–active continuum,
Hamilton notes, glosses over three important
analytical distinctions.
First, the individual may be asked simply
to imagine a situation or actually to perform
it. Hamilton (1976) terms this an ‘imaginaryperformed’
situation. Second, in connection with
performed role-play, he distinguishes between
structured and unstructured activities, the
difference depending upon whether the individual
is restricted by the experimenter to present
forms or lines. This Hamilton calls a ‘scriptedimprovised’
distinction. Third, the participant’s
activities may be verbal responses, usually of the
paper and pencil variety, or behavioural, involving
something much more akin to acting. This
distinction is termed ‘verbal-behavioural’. Turning
next to the content of role-play, Hamilton (1976)
distinguishes between relatively involving or
uninvolving contents, that is, where subjects are
required to act or to imagine themselves in a
situation or, alternatively, to react as they believe
another person would in those circumstances,
the basic issue here being what person the
subject is supposed to portray. Furthermore, in
connection with the role in which the person is
placed, Hamilton differentiates between studies
that assign the individual to the role of laboratory
subject and those that place the person in any
other role. Finally, the content of the role-play is
seen to include the context of the acted or the
imagined performance, that is, the elaborateness
of the scenario, the involvement of other actors,
and the presence or absence of an audience. The