DEVS 300 Chapter Notes - Chapter Week 5 : Final Analysis, Participant Observation, Truism
17 Feb 2017
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Problems of inference and proof in participant observation. The participant observer gathers data by participating in the daily life of the group or organization he studies. He watches the people he is studying to see what situations they ordinarily meet and how they behave in them. Sociologists usually use this method when they are especially interested in understanding a particular organization or substantive problem rather than demonstrating relations between abstractly defined variables. My discussion refers to the kind of participant observation study which seeks to discover hypotheses as well as to test them. Observational research produces an immense amount of detailed description; our files contain approximately 5000 single spaced pages of such material. Faced with such a quantity of (cid:494)rick(cid:495) but varied data, the researcher faces the problem of how to analyze it systematically and then to present his conclusions so as to convince other scientists of their validity.
