Naturalistic Observation Paper

Introduction The purpose of this study was to conduct observations, using two different methods, on children, between the ages of 4-5, to understand their emotional behaviors in a social and learning environment as well as determining which method of observation was more reliable. There are different methods of conducting observations, but two main ones include naturalistic observation and experimental observation. A naturalistic observation method is when a researcher studies a person or group in their natural environment or setting; the behavior that is observed is one that occurs in a person’s everyday life. In contrast, an experimental observation method is when a researcher is studying a specific behavior in a laboratory-like environment.
We agreed that Jay appeared to be neutral at the times 1:06 and 1:08. The observations that we disagreed on was when I observed Jay as being concerned at the times 1:06 and 1:07, whereas, my partner viewed Jay as just being neutral at time 1:07. Also, both my partner and I observed Jay smiling but we disagreed on the timeframe; I recorded her smiling at 1:08 whereas my partner recorded her smiling at 1:10. To an extent, my partner and I did observe the same behaviors, however, Jay would change her emotional reactions quickly, which made it hard to observe the features of the behavior. Also, I focused a little bit more on the behaviors that fell into the “other” category whereas my partner focused on the facial expressions which shows a difference in the emphases in our
In terms of reliability, inter-observer agreement is reliable when the percent of agreement is a high number because the number of agreements outweighed the number of disagreements. Thus, this means that there was a consistency of getting the same results. Out of the two naturalistic observations that my partner and I conducted, the one that led to the best inter-observer agreement was the time sampling method. This may be due to the fact that this method only focuses on one behavior and the coding system allowed us to be able to quickly record information and then redirect our attention back to Jay without potentially losing