The Importance of Not Being Subjective

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Essay 1 In this essay you will be finding out the importance of not being subjective. Subjective means that you are ‘of, relating to, or emanating from a person's emotions, prejudices, etc.’ (Collins English Dictionary , 2011) This means you would be influenced by your own personal feelings and would be judging a child. This could be because of how the child has behaved before. By doing this, you would be recording the behaviour that you expect the child to be doing rather than what the child is actually doing. This is bias because you are not recording what you actually are seeing and you are going against the child. You should be objective when carrying out an observation. Objectivity is when you are not influenced by personal feelings and are being fair. This makes your observation valid. Validity is when you are being honest, truthful and legally binding. (Collins English Dictionary, 2006). You do not think about the preconvieved ideas that you may have on that child because otherwise you may begin to write down the type of behaviour that the child may do and not what they are actually doing. The child may have been naughty the day before but today is a new day and therefore you should only record what you see on that day. When carrying out an observation you should be subjective which means you should not be bias. (Tassoni, 2005) Bias is when you have amental tendency or inclination, esp an irrational preference or prejudice (Collins English Dictionary , 2011). This means you are being prejudice and are judging someone or having an idea about them before actually knowing anything about that person. In childcare it could be that you have been told a child is always misbehaving and then when you go to do an observation o... ... middle of paper ... ...ve either not agreed to or withdrawn their permission. You need to explain to the parents or guardians that that confidentiality will occur. Confidentiality is when information is kept private from anyone but those that are authorised to do so can see it. In this case it will be yourself and your supervisor and the parents or guardians. Information you gain from the observations you may need to be passed onto other professionals. For example if there is a child protection issue then you may find you have an observation of when a child is acting differently to normal. This could be being aggressive or punching something continuously. This may need to be passed on to the designated person for the setting first then the head teacher and the if required social services. Information passed onto professionals should only be passed on if there is a good reason to do so.

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