Naturalistic Observation Paper

In lesson two, we learned about a variety of research methodologies that a psychologist could use when answering a research question. Every research method has its own strengths and weaknesses; which make some methods more reliable than others. When choosing which method one will use to answer a question, he/she should weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of the method and use that to determine which method will give he/she the best conclusions. Say we need to answer this research question: Does playing violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children? After taking into consideration everything mentioned above, I have chosen to use naturalistic observation and surveys to assess this question and come to a conclusion. Using

Conducting research with naturalistic observation gives psychologists an endless amount of advantages. In this case, using this method of research allows psychologists to study children in their home playing violent video games. This will produce the most accurate results because the child's environment will be the same. They will be playing violent video games in the same place they always do, this will help the results be more reliable than if this was tested in a lab. The fact that the child will be observed in its natural setting also increases the validity of this experiment. While using naturalistic observation provides psychologists with great advantages it also has some disadvantages. One disadvantage being that a child may respond differently because they know they are being observed; this could affect the reliability of the conclusions drawn from this experiment. If I were conducting this experiment, I would first identify my independent and dependent variables. In this case, the independent variable would be what kind of game I have the child play and the dependent variable would be the violent acts produced based on the game the child plays. I would observe a group of five girls and boys, all the same age, playing the same

A survey is a list of questions to be answered by research participants. Like all research methods, surveys have advantages and disadvantages. A disadvantage to using surveys is that people may not give accurate responses and we would not be able to collect as much information on each person, compared to another research method. Despite these disadvantages, surveys provide psychologists with the ability to gather data from larger samples of people. This advantage allows the data to be generalized to a larger population because the data was conducted from a large and diverse group. When addressing the research question: Does playing video games increase aggressive behavior in children?, surveys will help me gather more information. I would compose a list of questions about a child's behavior for parents to answer after their child has played a violent video game. This list of questions would be my independent variable and my dependent variable would be the responses to the questions in the survey. Unlike naturalistic observation, both the validity and reliability of this research method would be low. Simply because parents could lie about how their child behaved. While this method can be unreliable given the wrong circumstances, it is a great way to collect data from a large, diverse group under the right