Tag: observational protocol

Observational protocol and qualitative documentations

As a researcher, you could be a non-participant to a full-on participant when observing your subjects in a study.  Thus, the observed/empathized behavioral and activities of individuals in the study are jotted down in field notes (Creswell, 2013).  Most researchers use an observational protocol to jotting down these notes as they observe their subjects.  According to Creswell (2013), this protocol could consist of: “separate descriptive notes (portraits of the participants, a reconstruction of dialogue, a description of the physical setting, accounts of particular events, or activities) [to] reflective notes (the researcher’s personal thoughts, such as “speculation, feelings, problems, ideas, hunches, impressions, and prejudices), … this form might [have] demographic information about the time, place, and date of the field setting where the observation takes place.”

Whereas, observational work can be combined with in-depth interviewing, and sometimes the observational work (which can be an everyday activity) can help prepare the researcher for the interviews (Rubin, 2012).  Doing so can increase the quality of the interviews because the interviewers know what the researcher has seen or read and can provide more information on those materials.  This can also allow the researcher to master the terminology before entering the interview. Finally, Rubin (2012) also states that cultural norms become more visible through observation rather than just a pure in-depth interview.

In Creswell (2013), Qualitative Documents are information contained within documents that could help a researcher out in their study that could be either public (newspapers, meeting minutes, official reports) and/or private (personal journals/diaries, letters, emails, internal manuals, written procedures, etc.) documents.  This can also include pictures, videos, educational materials, books, files. Whereas, Artifact Analysis is the analysis of the written text, usually are charts, flow sheets, intake forms, reports, etc.

The main analysis approach of this document would be to read the document to gain a subject matter understanding.  Document analysis would aid in quickly grouping, sorting and resort the data obtained for a study.  This manual will not be included in the coded dataset, but will help provide appropriate codes/categories for the interview analysis, in other words give me suggestions about what might be related to what.   Finally, one way to interpret this document would be for triangulation of data (data from multiple sources that are highly correlated) between the observation, interviews and this document.   

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