POLI 311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: External Validity, Participant Observation
2 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Observaional research: direct observaion of poliical behaviour in its natural seing, enabling the researcher to study the behaviour as it occurs. It is both a data collecing acivity and a theory-generaing acivity. You collect data and then use this data to generate a theory. Oten you begin by collecing data, make some tentaive conclusions, collect more data, adjust conclusions, etc. it"s an iteraive cycle. Disadvantages: reacivity: people may change behaviour if they know they"re being observed. Trade-of between this and access, creates ethical problems: ethical consideraions, access. Types of observaional research: covert paricipant observaion, paricipant as observer, complete observer. Other drawbacks of observaional research: subjecivity may become biased towards only observing behaviours that support your theory, unreliability: many possible failures including not taking good notes.
