Naturalistic Methods

Naturalistic Methods

As we have seen in Chapter 6, self-report measures have the advantage of allowing the researcher to collect a large amount of information from the respondents quickly and easily. On the other hand, they also have the potential of being inaccurate if the respondent does not have access to, or is unwilling to express, his or her true beliefs. And we have seen in Chapter 4 that behavioral measures have the advantage of being more natural and thus less infl uenced by reactivity. In this chapter, we discuss descriptive research that uses behavioral measures. As we have seen in Chapter 1, descriptive research may be conducted either qualitatively—in which case the goal is to describe the observations in detail and to use those descriptions as the results, or quantitatively— in which the data is collected using systematic methods and the data are analyzed using statistical techniques. Keep in mind as you read the chapter that, as with most descriptive research, the goal is not only to test research  hypotheses, but also to develop ideas for topics that can be studied later using other types of research designs. However, as with survey research, naturalistic methods can also be used to create measured variables for use in correlational and experimental tests of research hypotheses.