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Children's Observational Study (1)

Part 1: Informal Observation

Observe children at the Emery Bldg (across the street from Stewart, adjacent to President's Circle). Observe for two 30-minute sessions, at least 15 minutes with a classmate, so that you can compare what you have observed.

The observation rooms are downstairs. Before you observe, you must sign in at the FCS office AEB room 22. They will give you guidance.

Please read the Observation booth rules before you go.


Observe the BambiniII class (pre-schoolers). They are in rooms 160 and 154 when in the building, and outside in the playground also.

Observe during a free-play period, if possible. They are on the playground from 10:30-11:30 am and 1:45-2:45 pm (approximately), which would be ideal. lunch is 11:45 and rest period is 12:30-1:15. Wednesday from 2-4 they are at Marriott.

Take notes (not to turn in) and bring to class.

This is an informal, qualitative observation period. What you observe will provide ideas for our quantitative study. Part 2 (below) will guide you in doing that.

Part 2: Hypotheses and variables

Submit to turnitin:
  1. A research question or two that we can study by observation
  2. Two or three hypotheses derived from the question(s).
  3. A way to operationalize the conceptual variables in your hypotheses. Provide an operational definition that is clear enough so that another observer could record it correctly.

The hard part of this assignment is step 3, and we will probably not get right until after we actually try to do it. But give it some thought. For example:

Your research question might be: Is there a gender difference in social organization? And your hypothesis might be: Boys play in larger groups than girls. (Your conceptual variables would then be gender and group size.)

Gender is usually easy to operationalize by observation, but what about group size? You might think that group size is also easy (just count them, right?) but what is a group? Is it based on proximity? interaction? How do you know they are interacting? Another conceptual variable might be "aggression." How do you measure it? What do you record? See Diamond's article ("soft sciences are harder than hard sciences") for consolation and inspiration.

Do anthropologists do this? Pros and Cons

In anthropological observational research, people often record behavior descriptively and develop operational definitions afterwards, when they code it for analysis. They may choose to do this to give context and because they may not know enough about the behavior to do otherwise. It carries the risk that you might not record some essential piece of information, or that various researchers will record things in different ways. But it has the advantage that you may record interesting things you didn't anticipate when you set up your code. How systematic you are, therefore, depends in part on how much you know about the behavior you are studying.