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Allied American University

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People Watching 101 – Naturalistic Observation

Many people enjoy sitting and watching other people. As a budding psychologist, you should know that this is how psychologists often discover what they would like to study in greater depth.

For this assignment, you will go out into a space where people are congregating and observe them for about 30 minutes. This type of research is called naturalistic observation. The goal of naturalistic observation is to watch a naturally occurring behavior and not change it in any way. People should not know they are being watched; otherwise, they may not act naturally.

Bring a pad of paper along with you and take notes about the things that you find interesting. Just try to be unobtrusive. Choose one particular behavior to focus on and watch several people. Make sure that you focus on one behavior to watch and take notes on the behavior. Try to be objective. Note the behavior, but try not to interpret it.

Once you have completed your observation, document your findings in a 2 to 3 page paper (excluding title and references pages). The paper should use APA formatting and include a title and reference page, even if the only resource used was the course textbook. Please visit the Academic Resource Center for helpful guidelines on APA style and citations. Please address the following elements in your paper:

3. What theory can you develop resulting from the observation?

4. Compare your naturalistic observation to at least one other approach to research listed in Chapter 2. Be sure to be specific in your answer.