Participant Observation Advantages and Disadvantages
- Created by: Megnicpip
- Created on: 18-02-18 20:00
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- Participant Observation
- Advantages
- Validity: Obtain richer data by seeing it. What people say they do and what they actually do are entirely different
- Flexibility: can change direction and make follow ups, open-minded and explanations can be formulated
- Insight: creates uniquely valid, authentic data, allows researcher to gain empathy through personal experience
- Practical Advantages
- Can build a rapport therefore gain trust
- Questioning can be ineffective
- Cicourel: joined police to understand assumptions when categorising juveniles
- Disadvantages
- Ethical problems; covert involves decievement and may involve illegal activities
- Practical Problems
- Time
- Many groups ,may not wish to be studied
- Interpersonal skills
- Personally stressful and demanding
- Representativeness: small scale
- Bias and Validity
- Risk going native and having divided loyalties
- Hawthorne effect
- too detached or too sympathetic
- ignores wider structural forces
- Reliability
- Whyte: his method was to some extent unique to him alone
- characteristics reliable so highly unlikely to be able to replicate
- qualitative data
- Advantages
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