Naturalistic Observation Essay

For the location of my naturalistic observational study I chose a public park with a splash pad which I frequently visit with my daughter. Since this site is quite popular with locals at any given time of the day there are at least over a dozen people present. As the park is designed for the entertainment of children the age group of the people varies. There are young children accompanied by their parents and grandparents as well as teenagers in groups. Therefore the above discussed park proved to be the greatest preference for me to observe the behavior of people in a natural setting.
To study a group of people in their natural environment without disturbing or influencing their usual behavior is called naturalistic observation. Consequently,

I had no way of knowing for certain which days will grandparents accompany my study subjects; therefore I visited the park three consecutive days and used one of the days without grandparents as my baseline. Therefore I could observe the behavior of mothers towards their children and compare it to days when the grandparents were also around. The reason behind my decision to observe such behavior stems from my own experience with my daughters grandparents. My own behavior changes when they are around while and I was curious to see if other moms exhibit the same behavioral patterns as I

In some sense people are more truthful in their behavior when they don’t know that they are being observed. On the other hand “People may behave differently when they know they are being watched. Sometimes people try to behave better that they normally would in order to appear more socially desirable or acceptable” (3) and this could be contributed as a downside of naturalistic observation. Only in my personal opinion my individual research was successful, but quite inadequate in providing solid and undisputable evidence, possibly my research would benefit from more observation and data