Reference no: EM133412238

Case Study: begin preparations to conduct an unobtrusive naturalistic observational study. Go outside and find something you would like to count under two separate circumstances. The thing you count can be people, animals, or physical objects, but you must not interfere with them as you count them. After you have chosen your chosen subject, you then need to count it twice, either in different locations or at different times. For example, say you're interested in how many dogs go to your local dog park within the span of one-hour on a Tuesday morning compared to a Tuesday afternoon. You could go to the park for one hour in the morning, count and record the number of dogs you see, and then go again in the afternoon and count and record the same thing. Essentially you want to pick a subject and see how it varies under different circumstances. However, you should avoid counting things related to people's identity. For example, don't count how many men versus women enter a certain store. As an alternative, you could count how many people entering the store are wearing hats or not! But don't pick something that would force you to make assumptions about a person's background or personal identity.

Select your variable of interest and provide an operationalization for it. For instance, in one of the examples above you might count how many people have a garden on a certain street, but there are many definitions of a garden. Do they simply need to have a lawn? Or do they need to have flowers? What if they just have bushes and trees? You need to specify exactly what you mean by the variable you intend to count.

Decide on your two locations or time periods and provide a brief rationale for why you selected them.

Question: Prepare for how you will record these data. For example, initial data can be collected with a paper and pencil, but next week you will put it in a data file on your computer. How will you prepare the data file? Importantly, how will you ensure good record-keeping in a manner that can convincingly demonstrate that you did not simply fabricate these data? (e.g., You can keep photographs of the cigarette butts you count.)