Qualitative Project : Observational Methods

An individual will benefit from active participation because it builds self-esteem and improves confidence. Feeling good and confident are important ways of improving people's general and emotional health. Everyone has the right to participate in society.

(1.2) In a school participation means that everyone has to be involved and this involves

This method includes the observer not being part of the group and just watching from a far distance. The advantage of this method is that the observer may get some good data as they are observing closely. Easier to record data as you are not participating, also it is very cheap and simple. However, the disadvantages are that you may not get as much data as you are not a part of the discussions so you may not get a lot of information as you would like.

I felt at ease in this setting, as there were many more customers like myself, sitting alone reading, typing away on their laptops, writing in yellow pads or studying. Being in plain sight in a public environment, I assumed the role of a participant observer despite feeling a little unsure about the landscape of this assignment and insecure about my field note taking capabilities.

During the group discussions it helped me earn feedback from my different peers in the class and view the different thoughts and ideas that my fellow classmates had. When writing an essay, having different classmates review my work and give feedback helped me learn more about myself and other people. It helped me learn that people will always have a different point of view when it comes to writing, and I also learned that peer reviews are a precise and beneficial way of showing different ideas and showing mistakes that I made in my essay. This also contributed to my overall improvements of

“The fact is that I always learn much more from the other participants than they could ever learn from me. Each gathering enables me to benefit from the perspectives of so many others (page

Using this type of research method, I can understand what I would have used other type of research method Taylor et al (1995) ‘‘argued that participant observation offers the best opportunity to discover how people see the world in which they live. It also provides the kind of insight, fresh information and new directions for research which are less likely to come from other methods. ’’

Describe the 3 types of membership within a CoP (Wenger, 1998) giving one example of each from your own personal experience. The three types of membership within a “ Community of Practice” are full participation, peripheral participation and marginal participation. A full participant is the one that participates in the practices of the community. For example, when a participant is part of a group project in college, and does all the assignments, attends the meetings and collaborates well with the other participants, this student is a full participant in his/her community.

The author defined participation in the following words “The most robust explanation of participation is likely to be found in considering both the psychological and sociological perspectives.”

The benefits of allowing non-experts to partake in the conversation and weigh in their opinions, is that it provides an objective third party. Having this outside perspective helps with issues that experts often cannot see from the inside of their own community such as groupthink. This is a phenomenon where all members working on a specific topic will fall victim to a limited way of

How does one observe while simultaneously participating? It is an awkward position for the researcher to be in—the very nature of the term “participant observation” is at odds with each other; therefore the author must keep a degree of distance in order to fully observe and record their observations. At the same time, the author must do as the locals do, which is: it is very important for the researcher to connect with members of the population. As the researcher gets to know the members of a group he or she will be studying, it is important that they learn to make friends quickly so they can be accepted in the community and obtain quality research in the form of observation, interviews, and accurately record field notes. Additionally, the researcher will have to take all their personal thoughts, interviews, and observations and organize the data with an eye towards their own biases and subjectivities. These are some of the positive aspects of participation observation, but there are many potential drawbacks as well.

The responses can be projected on to a screen so that everyone in the group can be in concordance with the statement.14 However, these interactions can be successful only if people do not withhold information out of fear of retribution. To resolve this problem, the researcher needs a window into the community through the help of a community supporter throughout the meetings or group discussions.

Conversely, the disadvantage of this method is that the presence of an observer may affect the employee causing them to alter their normal work behavior.

A descriptive research design was adopted for this research. According to (Cooper & Schindler, 2003), a descriptive study is concerned with finding out the what, where and how of a phenomenon. (Saunder et al, 2003) further assert that descriptive research is used principally to gain a deeper understanding of something. The descriptive research collects data in order to answer questions

As mentioned, the research method used for this study was participant observation. This was further divided into three different segments. Each of these segments featured its own distinct observation site and involved one hour of observation per site.