RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

404 OBSERVATION
Critical incidents
There will be times when reliability as consistency
in observations is not always necessary. For
example, a student might demonstrate a particular
behaviour only once, but it is so important as
not to be ruled out simply because it occurred
once. One has to commit only a single murder
to be branded a murderer! Sometimes one
event can occur which reveals an extremely
important insight into a person or situation.
Critical incidents (Flanagan 1949) and critical
events (Wragg 1994) are particular events or
occurrences that might typify or illuminate very
starkly a particular feature of a teacher’s behaviour
or teaching style for example. Wragg (1994: 64)
writes that these are events that appear to the
observer to have more interest than other ones,
and therefore warrant greater detail and recording
than other events; they have an important insight
to offer. For example, a child might unexpectedly
behave very aggressively when asked to work
with another child – that might reveal an insight
into the child’s social tolerance; a teacher might
suddenly overreact when a student produces a
substandard piece of work – the straw that breaks
the camel’s back – that might indicate a level of
frustration tolerance or intolerance and the effects
of that threshold of tolerance being reached.
These events are critical in that they may be
non-routine but very revealing; they offer the
researcher an insight that would not be available by
routine observation. They are frequently unusual
events. 2
Naturalistic and participant observation
There are degrees of participation in observation
(LeCompte and Preissle 1993: 93–4). The
‘complete participant’ is a researcher who takes
on an insider role in the group being studied, and
maybe who does not even declare that he or she
is a researcher (discussed later in comments about
the ethics of covert research). The ‘participant-asobserver’,
as its name suggests, is part of the social
life of participants and documents and records
what is happening for research purposes. The
‘observer-as-participant’, like the participant-asobserver,
is known as a researcher to the group,
and maybe has less extensive contact with the
group. With the ‘complete observer’ participants
do not realize that they are being observed
(e.g. using a one-way mirror), hence this is
another form of covert research. Hammersley and
Atkinson (1983: 93–5) suggest that comparative
involvement may come in the forms of the
complete participant and the participant-asobserver,
with a degree of subjectivity and
sympathy, while comparative detachment may
come in the forms of the observer-as-participant
and the complete observer, where objectivity and
distance are key characteristics. Both complete
participation and complete detachment are as
limiting as each other. As a complete participant
the researcher dare not go outside the confines of
the group for fear of revealing his or her identity (in
covert research), and as a complete observer there
is no contact with the observed, so inference is
dangerous. That said, both complete participation
and complete detachment minimize reactivity,
though in the former there is the risk of ‘going
native’ – where the researcher adopts the values,
norms and behaviours of the group, i.e. ceases to be
aresearcherandbecomesamemberofthegroup.
Participant observation may be particularly
useful in studying small groups, or for events
and processes that last only a short time or are
frequent, for activities that lend themselves to
being observed, for researchers who wish to reach
inside a situation and have a long time available
to them to ‘get under the skin’ of behaviour
or organizations (as in an ethnography), and
when the prime interest is in gathering detailed
information about what is happening (i.e. is
descriptive).
In participant observational studies the researcher
stays with the participants for a substantial
period of time to reduce reactivity effects (the effects
of the researcher on the researched, changing
the behaviour of the latter), recording what is
happening, while taking a role in that situation.
In schools this might be taking on some particular
activities, sharing supervisions, participating in
school life, recording impressions, conversations,