Five Decisions to Make about an Observation Study

1. Which occasions to observe, and why?

You probably are interested in particular types of events, and it is worth trying to articulate what those are. If you don't have a good list of the types of events you think are important, two things can happen:  (a)  you will spend a lot of time watching stuff that is irrelevant, and probably writing notes about it, thus filling your data with irrelevant details; and (b) you will stumble onto something relevant but it will be serendipitous and you won't really know whether this is typical of the stuff you are after or not.  Don't be satisfied with a target like "elementary or middle school social studies." Don't be satisfied with simply naming a topic, like "division by fractions" or "Asia." Be more specific.  Do you want to see (a) how teachers represent these topics, (b) what the text says about these topics, (c) what questions teachers ask, (c) what kind of intellectual work kids are asked to do, (d) what values are expressed, (e) what emotions are expressed, etc.  The clearer you can be about what you are looking for, the greater are your chances of finding it.

2. What is relevant and what is not

While you are observing, things happen fast, and you will notice some things more than others, because they are more dramatic, more interesting to you, more colorful, more humorous, etc.    But they may not necessarily be more revealing in terms of what you want to learn about.  So you have to have a very clear frame of reference to help you document the right things in the thick of the moment.

3. How to document?

There are three ways to document events:  videotape, audiotape and notes.  Each one has advantages and disadvantages.  Technology can break, and human notes are incomplete and sometimes mistaken.  Videotapes are invasive and make people self conscious.  Audiotapes pick up a huge amount of extraneous noise.  Cryptic notes are hard to read and make no sense two weeks after they are written.

If you choose hand-written notes, you need to do the following: 

• Devise a set of private short-hand symbols.  for instance, use T for teacher, S1, S2, etc for students.  If their race and gender is important, figure out a way to note that also.  DO NOT use their names. Generate symbols for other actions too, like a teacher question could be TQ and a student response SR.  Or the reverse, and SQ followed by a TR.
• Practice before you do the actual thing so that you get used to using your symbol system.
• Schedule a two-three hour block of time within a day of the observation  to type up your notes and to elaborate the details as much as possible so that your account is thorough and accurate.

4. Distinguish reporting from interpreting

You will likely focus on particular events because they have meaning vis a vis your topic, but you should try to make your notes as descriptively accurate as possible and try to separate your interpretations from the events themselves.  Maybe put interpretations in brackets or something,  like this:

TQ:  what about this? 
SR  I don't know. 
TR [seems angry or impatient] . . .
S1 Why do we have to learn this?
TR because its in the book. [good eg of T passivity]

 

© Mary Kennedy, 2006