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CHAPTER 4: Observation 105FIGURE 4.4Jean Piaget (1896–1980) used structured observation to investigate children’s cognitivedevelopment.and then given several variations of the problem to test the limits of the child’sunderstanding. These structured observations have provided a wealth of informationregarding children’s cognition and are the basis for Piaget’s “stagetheory” of intellectual development (Piaget, 1965).Structured observation is a middle ground between the passive noninterventionof naturalistic observation and the systematic control and manipulationof independent variables in laboratory experiments. This compromise allowsresearchers to make observations in more natural settings than the laboratory.Nevertheless, there may be a price to pay. If observers fail to follow similar procedureseach time they make an observation, it is difficult for other observersto obtain the same results when investigating the same problem. Uncontrolled,and perhaps unknown, variables may play an important part in producing thebehavior under observation. To prevent this problem, researchers must be consistentin their procedures and try to “structure” their observations as similarlyas possible across observations.Key ConceptField Experiments When a researcher manipulates one or more independentvariables in a natural setting in order to determine the effect on behavior, theprocedure is called a field experiment. The field experiment represents the mostextreme form of intervention in observational methods. The essential difference