Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Descriptive Research Methods21Descriptive Research MethodsKey Theme• Descriptive research methods are used to systematically observe anddescribe behavior.Key Questions• What are naturalistic observation and case study research, and why andhow are they conducted?• What is a survey, and why is random selection important in surveyresearch?• What are the advantages and disadvantages of each descriptive method?descriptive research methodsScientific procedures that involve systematicallyobserving behavior in order to describe therelationship among behaviors and events.naturalistic observationThe systematic observation and recordingof behaviors as they occur in their naturalsetting.Descriptive research methods are strategies for observing and describing behavior.Using descriptive methods, researchers can answer important questions, such as whencertain behaviors take place, how often they occur, and whether they are related toother factors, such as a person’s age, ethnic group, or educational level. As you’ll seein this section, descriptive methods can provide a wealth of information about behavior,especially behaviors that would be difficult or impossible to study experimentally.Naturalistic ObservationThe Science of People- and Animal-WatchingWhen psychologists systematically observe and record behaviors as they occur in theirnatural settings, they are using the descriptive method called naturalistic observation.Usually, researchers engaged in naturalistic observation try to avoid being detected bytheir subjects, whether people or nonhuman animals. The basic goal of naturalistic observationis to detect the behavior patterns that exist naturally—patterns that might notbe apparent in a laboratory or if the subjects knew they were being watched.As you might expect, psychologists very carefully define the behaviors that theywill observe and measure before they begin their research. Often, to increase the accuracyof the observations, two or more observers are used. In some studies, observationsare recorded so that the researchers can carefully analyze the details of thebehaviors being studied.One advantage of naturalistic observation is that it allows researchers to study humanbehaviors that cannot ethically be manipulated in an experiment. For example,suppose that a psychologist wants to study bullying behavior in children. It wouldnot be ethical to deliberately create a situation in which one child is aggressively bulliedby another child. However, it would be ethical to study bullying by observingaggressive behavior in children on acrowded school playground (see Hawkins& others, 2001).As a research tool, naturalistic observationcan be used wherever patterns of behaviorcan be openly observed—from therain forests of the Amazon to fast-foodrestaurants, shopping malls, and city streets.Because the observations occur in the naturalsetting, the results of naturalistic observationstudies can often be generalizedmore confidently to real-life situations thancan the re sults of studies using artificiallymanipulated or staged situations.Naturalistic Observation: Studying the“Pace of Life” Naturalistic observation canbe used to study many different types ofbehavior. For example, social psychologistRobert Levine (1997) set out to comparethe “pace of life” in 31 different countries.How could you operationally definethe “pace of life”? One measurethat Levine adopted was “theamount of time it took a pedestrianto walk a distance of 60 feeton a downtown city street.” Tocollect the data, observers unobtrusivelytimed at least 35 maleand 35 female pedestrians in eachcountry (Levine & Norenzayan,1999). The results? The fastestwalkers were clocked in Irelandand the slowest in Brazil. Of the31 countries, walkers in theUnited States were ranked as the6th fastest, and Canadian walkerscame in at 11th.