RM - Observational design Flashcards
Define behavioural categories
Dividing a target behaviour (such as stress or aggression) into a subset of specific and operationalised behaviours.
What is event sampling?
An observational technique in which a count is kept of the number of times a certain behaviour (event) occurs.
What is sampling?
The method used to select participants, such as random, opportunity and volunteer sampling, or to select behaviours in an observation such as event or time sampling.
What is structured observation?
A researcher uses various systems to organise observations, such as behavioural categories and sampling procedures.
What is time sampling?
An observational technique in which the observer records behaviours in a given time frame, e.g. noting what a target individual is doing every 15s or 20s or 1 minute. The observer may select one or more behavioural categories to tick at this time interval.
Why can observations be hard to do?
- It is difficult to work out what to record and what not to record.
- It is difficult to record everything that is happening.
What happens in an unstructured observation?
The researcher ecordsall relevant behaviour but has no system.
What is the problem with unstructured observations?
There may be too much to record.
The behaviours recorded will often be those which are most visible or eye-catching to the observer but these may not necessarily be the most relevant or important behaviours.
When are unstructured observations likely to be used?
Where research hasn’t been conducted before as a kind of pilot study to see what behaviours might be recorded using a structured system.
What is most preferable, structured or unstructured observations?
Structured
What are the 2 main ways to structure observations?
By using behavioural categories and sampling procedures.
What 3 things should behavioural categories do?
Be objective - the observer should not make inferences about the behaviour, but should just record explicit actions.
Cover all possible component behaviours and avoid a ‘waste basket’ category.
Be mutually exclusive - You should not have to mark two categories at one time.
What must a researcher do in order to conduct systematic observations?
Break up this stream of behaviour into different behavioural categories by operationalisation - breaking the behaviour into different behavioural categories.
What are examples of when the observational design and behavioural categories were used?
Topal et al. (1998) used the Strange situation technique to explore the attachments between dogs and their owners.
There were 8 behavioural categories and two observers sampled the behaviour every 10s, rating each category on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 meant they were very confident about this observation.
Paul Ekman and colleague (1978) developed a coding system to record non-verbal behaviours. This can be used to investigate, for example, what expressions are shown on a person’s face when they are lying.
What type of method is observation?
Non-experimental.
