What is the difference between naturalistic observation and case study

An example of consistency is when paint is applied uniformly so that the wall looks the same from one side to the other. External consistency is achieved when the firm's external behavior and strategic moves are in line with its overarching brand message. Decisions such as moving the brand into a new segment, or up and down the price ladder, have to be analysed from a strategic consistency perspective.

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Get a writing assignment done or a free consulting with qualified academic writer. Read also What is the name of the natural process which levels the earth surface? What is naturalism in psychology? Why are good observation skills important? What are Earth's processes? What are the 4 types of fallacies? What is special about Ethiopian coffee?

What is the meaning of process description? What is a process evaluation? What is Process essay? Can you enlarge breasts without surgery? You will be interested What does natural justice mean? What does fallacy mean? How long does it take to get FIRB approval? What are the process of stratification of rocks? With that said some quantitative data may also be included in the write-up of a case study. As with other qualitative methods, a variety of different methods and tools can be used to collect information on the case.

For instance, interviews, naturalistic observation, structured observation, psychological testing e. HM is one of the most notorious case studies in psychology. HM suffered from intractable and very severe epilepsy. The treatment was a success, in that it resolved his epilepsy and his IQ and personality were unaffected. However, the doctors soon realized that HM exhibited a strange form of amnesia, called anterograde amnesia.

HM was able to carry out a conversation and he could remember short strings of letters, digits, and words. Basically, his short term memory was preserved. However, HM could not commit new events to memory. He lost the ability to transfer information from his short-term memory to his long term memory, something memory researchers call consolidation.

So while he could carry on a conversation with someone, he would completely forget the conversation after it ended. It also suggested that the temporal lobes are particularly important for consolidating new information i. Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim, and she was an early feminist who went on to make important contributions to the field of social work. One of them was that for several weeks she was unable to drink any fluids. According to Freud,. She would take up the glass of water that she longed for, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it away like someone suffering from hydrophobia.

The patient had said nothing, as she had wanted to be polite. After giving further energetic expression to the anger she had held back, she asked for something to drink, drank a large quantity of water without any difficulty, and awoke from her hypnosis with the glass at her lips; and thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return.

Furthermore, her recollection of the incident, along with her expression of the emotion she had repressed, caused the symptom to go away. As evidence for the theory, however, it is essentially worthless. Figure Case studies are useful because they provide a level of detailed analysis not found in many other research methods and greater insights may be gained from this more detailed analysis. As a result of the case study, the researcher may gain a sharpened understanding of what might become important to look at more extensively in future more controlled research.

Case studies are also often the only way to study rare conditions because it may be impossible to find a large enough sample to individuals with the condition to use quantitative methods.

Although at first glance a case study of a rare individual might seem to tell us little about ourselves, they often do provide insights into normal behavior. The case of HM provided important insights into the role of the hippocampus in memory consolidation.

However, it is important to note that while case studies can provide insights into certain areas and variables to study, and can be useful in helping develop theories, they should never be used as evidence for theories. In other words, case studies can be used as inspiration to formulate theories and hypotheses, but those hypotheses and theories then need to be formally tested using more rigorous quantitative methods.

Case studies lack the proper controls that true experiments contain. As such they suffer from problems with internal validity, so they cannot be used to determine causation. The fact is, with case studies we cannot rule out these sorts of alternative explanations. So as with all observational methods case studies do not permit determination of causation.

In addition, because case studies are often of a single individual, and typically a very abnormal individual, researchers cannot generalize their conclusions to other individuals. Recall that with most research designs there is a trade-off between internal and external validity, with case studies, however, there are problems with both internal validity and external validity. So there are limits both to the ability to determine causation and to generalize the results.

A final limitation of case studies is that ample opportunity exists for the theoretical biases of the researcher to color or bias the case description.

Another approach that is often considered observational research is the use of archival research which involves analyzing data that have already been collected for some other purpose. In one study, they examined Social Security records to show that women with the names Virginia, Georgia, Louise, and Florence were especially likely to have moved to the states of Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida, respectively.

As with naturalistic observation, measurement can be more or less straightforward when working with archival data. For example, counting the number of people named Virginia who live in various states based on Social Security records is relatively straightforward.

In the s, healthy male college students had completed an open-ended questionnaire about difficult wartime experiences. More pessimistic people tend to blame themselves and expect long-term negative consequences that affect many aspects of their lives, while more optimistic people tend to blame outside forces and expect limited negative consequences.

To obtain a measure of explanatory style for each participant, the researchers used a procedure in which all negative events mentioned in the questionnaire responses, and any causal explanations for them were identified and written on index cards.

These were given to a separate group of raters who rated each explanation in terms of three separate dimensions of optimism-pessimism. These ratings were then averaged to produce an explanatory style score for each participant.

The primary result was that the more optimistic the men were as undergraduate students, the healthier they were as older men. This method is an example of content analysis —a family of systematic approaches to measurement using complex archival data.

Just as structured observation requires specifying the behaviors of interest and then noting them as they occur, content analysis requires specifying keywords, phrases, or ideas and then finding all occurrences of them in the data. These occurrences can then be counted, timed e.

Chiang, Dana C. Skip to content 6. According to Freud, She would take up the glass of water that she longed for, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it away like someone suffering from hydrophobia. Key Takeaways There are several different approaches to observational research including naturalistic observation, participant observation, structured observation, case studies, and archival research.

Naturalistic observation is used to observe people in their natural setting, participant observation involves becoming an active member of the group being observed, structured observation involves coding a small number of behaviors in a quantitative manner, case studies are typically used to collect in-depth information on a single individual, and archival research involves analysing existing data.

The Memorable Case of H. A famous case study in psychology and neuroscience is that of the patient H. When H. However, the surgery also had the effect of rendering him unable to remember any recent events. The many case studies of H. Advantages of Case Studies Case studies provide incredibly rich data sets that can address interesting theoretical or applied research questions. In many circumstances, insights obtained from case studies would not likely have been obtained using other types of research methods.

Disadvantages of Case Studies Drawing inferences from a case study to the more general population may not be valid. Case studies can also include both accurate and inaccurate information, and it may not be very easy to determine what information is the most accurate.

Archival Research Archival research refers to studies of data that have been previously collected. Many archival databases are available for use by any researcher interested in analyzing the data. More relevant to researchers in psychology is the General Social Survey GSS , which contains demographic and attitudinal data. While this type of research may seem quite simple, to do it properly requires the creation of detailed coding schemes and long hours poring over transcripts and other existing materials.

Advantages of Archival Research An advantage of archival research is that researchers do not need to collect the data themselves, which saves a lot of time and money. The nature of archival data also enables the researcher to obtain a relatively large, representative sample. Large samples enable investigators to use complex, sophisticated statistical approaches to test different models or theories against one another.

Some databases also enable researchers to access data that would be very difficult and costly to collect on their own and might be beyond the scope of what an individual researcher could collect in a reasonable amount of time. Disadvantages of Archival Research A disadvantage of archival research is that your research questions are limited to the specific data that have been collected.

Meta-Analysis Meta-analysis involves summarizing and synthesizing past a body of research to compare results across a number of studies. You could read the entire body of research and write a review paper that captures the overall conclusions from the individual reports.

You could also count the studies that show one outcome, the studies that show the opposite outcome, and the studies that are inconclusive. Finally, you could opt for a third and more effective method by conducting a meta-analysis that compares the effect sizes across different studies.

Effect size refers to the strength of the relationship between or magnitude of the difference of two variables. When conducting a meta-analysis, researchers need to figure out how to classify and combine data from different scales that assess either similar or somewhat different variables, how to code data into meaningful categories that can be used in the analysis, and what to do with low-quality or missing data.

Advantages of Meta-Analysis You do not need to collect data to conduct a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis also provides an objective way to compare findings across many studies. Researchers can sift through a large number of studies to determine an overall effect that, without the use of meta-analysis, might have remained unknown due to the variety of results reported in multiple studies. Disadvantages of Meta-Analysis The quality of a meta-analysis depends on finding high-quality research reports, which may simply be lacking in some areas of interest.

In addition, only studies that find statistically significant effects tend to be published, leading to biased reports. Another disadvantage of meta-analysis is that it is time consuming to search for studies, code each study, and conduct the analysis. About the Authors.