Unobtrusive Research

Week 6
10/16
Ch. 6
When it is Difficult to Conduct
Traditional Research Methods
• How do we observe individuals’ behaviors
when they are aware of our presence?
– Reactivity, social desirability
– Participants’ awareness of observer affects
measurement
• How do we observe behaviors when the
individuals are no longer there?
– “Fossils” and “footprints”
 Unobtrusive Measures
• “Nonreactive” Measures
– Indirect investigation of behavior
• Individual being studied is no longer present
• Unaware that they are being “observed”
• Can study Natural Treatments- “naturally”
occurring events that have significant impact
on people
– Can be “natural” or caused by humans
• Two Primary Methods:
– Physical Traces
– Archival Records
 Physical Trace Measures
• Similar to a footprint or fossil
– Participant is no longer present
– Nonreactive
• Often used in conjunction with multimethod
approach
– Use different types of measures of behavior
– Increases validity/generalizability by reducing
likelihood that findings are due to an “abnormal”
observation
 Types of Physical Traces
• Use Traces- physical evidence resulting from
use/nonuse of an item
– Natural-Use Traces-- appearance result of
naturally occurring events, no intervention from
investigator
• Students’ underlining of textbooks
– Controlled-Use Traces (“Planned-Use”)-- some
degree of intervention by investigator
• Investigators created “seals” between pages-- examined
if students broke these seals (read those pages)
» Friedman & Wilson (1975)
 Types of Physical Traces
continued...
• Products- products owned by people or
created by people
– What people eat, products that express
attitudes/beliefs/behaviors, graffiti
– More often used by historians and
anthropologists, but still gives
psychologists interesting information on
human behavior
 Archival Data
• Records/documents of behaviors of
individuals, groups, governments,
countries, etc...
– Birth certificates, medical records, school
records, sports statistics, voting,
imports/exports
– Also includes media, books, information on
the internet
 Types of Archival Data
• Running Records- continuously kept,
updated frequently
– Sports statistics, credit
• Episodic Records- discontinuous, one
time thing
– Birth certificate
• Range from Publicly Accessible to
Private information
 Content Analysis
• Making inferences based on objective coding of
archival records
• 3 Steps
– Identifying Relevant Source-- depends on study
– Sampling Selection-- want to select representative sample
– Coding Units of Analysis-- make reliable coding based on
relevant descriptive categories
• Can be quantitative or qualitative
1. Quantitative-- in written/spoken communications, involves
single words, sentences, themes, etc. (e.g., number of
times they said Madonna on CNN yesterday)
2. Qualitative-- rating written/spoken communications based
on particular dimensions (e.g., how “distraught”
newsperson was based on negative language)
Disadvantages of Unobtrusive
Measures
• Difficulties with validity
– Often need supplementary data-- unobtrusive measures
often not comprehensive
• Multimethod approach
– “Social-Perception” versus “Self-Perception”
• Is definition of behavior based on how you act/view yourself
(self-perception) or how other people view you and your actions
(social-perception)?
• Are people actually behaving that way or are others interpreting
their behavior in that way?
• Difficulties with reliability
– Possibility for bias-- selective deposit (records being
created) or survival (records being missing/incomplete) of
records
• Spurious relationships-- false indication that 2
variables are related (variables coincidently or
accidentally related)-- look for a 3rd variable
 Ethical Issues with
Unobtrusive Measures
• Ethical obligation to improve individuals’
lives and societal conditions
– Psychologists strive to meet this obligation
with unobtrusive research
• Risk/Benefit Ratio:
– Risk/Cost to society for not doing this study
– Risk/Cost to “participants”-- can you truly
obtain informed consent?
 Group Exercise
• Groups of 4
• Use unobtrusive measures to examine
drinking rates in males versus females at
DePaul
– Can use physical and/or archival data
– How do you make your data valid? Reliable
coding? Spurious relationships?
– Can you use a multimethod approach?
– Are there any ethical issues?