Participant Observation Advantages and Disadvantages

Participant Observation Advantages and Disadvantages

1. Advantages

   • Validity
     • What people say they do in questionnaires is different from what they may do.
     • Produces rich qualitative data
   • Insight
     • Allows sociologist to feel empathy for participants.
     • Gives insight into peoples private and un-influenced lives
   • Flexibility
     • Sociologists don't start with a set hypothesis
     • Sociologists may change their mind and can alter their research accordingly
   • Practical Advantages
     • May be the only way to study certain groups
       • Such as criminals
       • Such as religious sects
     • Allows sociologist to build rapport with those being studied

2. Disadvantages

   • Practical Disadvantages
     • Time consuming as well as costly
     • Personally stressful and demanding
     • Requires observational skills
     • Personal characteristics may cause issues with being covert
     • Groups may be able to refuse or restrict access
   • Ethical issues
     • Covert observation creates ethical difficulties as it intrinsically requires deception
     • Some groups may not have the ability to refuse participant obeervation and they may not consent to being observed
   • Representitiveness
     • Due to the cost and the amount of time it would take very few people can be observed
     • Lack of representativeness leads to an inability to accurately/effectively generalise
     • "Internally" valid insights are not externally valid
   • Reliability
     • Reliability is the ability to repeat a research method and get similar/the same results
     • Participant observation depends on the skills of the researcher meaning that it would be difficult for a different researcher to replicate it
     • A groups actions may be due to a variety of different pre-existing reasons which are impossible to control for
   • Bias
     • Researchers run the risk of...
       • "Going native"
       • Loyalty or fear of reprisal may push a sociologist to hide sensitive information
       • Sociologists may romanticise a group and come to see them as an underdog and justify their actions
   • Validity
     • Validity may be damaged as sociologists decide what is worth recording
       • A sociologist may only record what fits their prejudices
       • May not create a "naturalistic" account
     • The Hawthorne Effect damages validity
   • Lack of structure
     • Interactionalists favour participant observation as they see society on a small scale
     • Structural sociologists (such as marxists) reject this arguing that the observer tends to ignore the wider structural forces changing our behaivour
     • Structuralists believe that looking at life through the eyes of the actor will never give us the complete picture
       • For example if the actors aren't aware of structural influences in their life