In this video, we're going to be talking about observational research. This is a method in which a researcher systematically observes and records behavior. This can be very useful because people do not always accurately self-report on their behavior. Either they are not able to, not self-aware enough to, or sometimes people just lie. If you observe the behavior directly and can make objective judgments about it, you don't have to worry about participants not self-reporting it very accurately.
Typically, observational research is done without or with minimal interference from the researcher. The idea here is to get the most natural behavior possible, and of course, people usually don't behave naturally if they know that they're being watched. There are two main types of observational research. We have naturalistic observation, which is an observational method where psychologists observe the behavior of their subjects, either humans or animals, in their natural environment. If you're studying chimpanzees, you might be out in the jungle of Tanzania.
If you're studying humans, you might be going out into a university, into a grocery store, into a bar, to actually observe the behavior. Typically with naturalistic observation, you as a researcher would want to really blend in. You don't want people to know that they're being observed. Again, the idea here is to get the most natural behavior within the natural environment as possible. In contrast, we also have laboratory observations.
This is a method where psychologists observe the behavior of their subjects in a controlled environment. You would bring your participants into your lab, give them a certain task to complete, and then you would usually leave the room so they're alone in the room and you're either watching them through a two-way mirror or perhaps you have a camera set up in the room to record, the person or the interaction. Sometimes there are even hidden cameras to kind of take that pressure off the person. The benefit of laboratory observations is that you can control your subject pool and the tasks that they are doing.
For example, if you want to study marital conflict, you can have a married couple come into your lab and have a disagreement right there in the room. These are very useful in that sense. Now, we're going to get into the strengths and limitations of observational research and these strengths will apply to both naturalistic and laboratory observations. One general strength of this method is that it typically provides very rich, detailed data that is very useful for describing behavior. To give you an example of what I mean by that, back in grad school, I did a ton of laboratory observations and my favorite one was when we would give 3 to 4-year-old children a very challenging puzzle box and we would tell them if you can solve it, you can have a prize at the end.
We'd leave them alone in the room for 5 minutes and just record their behavior. With that task, we could assess things like children's problem-solving skills, their logical thinking skills, their creative thinking, how they use tools in their environment to help them solve a problem. But we could also use that task to assess how young children respond to frustration because most preschoolers get very angry when they can't solve a problem or they're not going to get a prize. So we'd observe how they respond to frustration, how they self-soothe, how they self-regulate, etc.
Just with that one task, we could assess 5 or 6 different aspects of a child's development or skill level. That's what I mean when I say that a well-designed observational study is going to get you very rich data that is useful for describing behavior in multiple ways potentially. These, of course, are also a really good way to study more natural behavior. You don't have the chance of a person altering their responses on a questionnaire to look more socially desirable. This is especially true of naturalistic observations.
In terms of limitations for naturalistic observations, you are going to have minimal control over your environment and your subject pool. For example, if you're doing a naturalistic observation in a grocery store, there's a chance that maybe the customers coming into the store that day don't demographically represent your area or your county particularly well. If you're studying chimpanzees, maybe there's a predator in the area that day, and the chimps just don't want to show up and you have no control over that. With laboratory observations, one thing to be aware of is that subjects can alter their behavior when they know that they're being watched, and this is especially true for adults.
Although, just to give you my personal experience, from what I've seen, adults will act a little bit differently for the first couple of minutes. But once they get comfortable in the lab and kind of get into the flow of whatever task you've given them, you'd be surprised how naturally people will act even in a laboratory setting. Alright, those are observational studies, and I will see you guys in the next video. Bye-bye.