What Is an Observational Study?
You can use an observational study if you do not need any interference or manipulations with the research subject. This type of study is mostly qualitative in nature. If there are some quantitative studies here, they are rare. You do not need treatment or control groups, either. All your answers and results will be based on what you have observed. The purpose of such research is usually either exploratory or explanatory.
Observational studies are common for social science, medicine, and hard science research projects. They are applied when there are some practical or ethical limitations that do not allow traditional experiments. It is sometimes challenging to formulate accurate inferences because there are no control and treatment groups. So, there is a risk of influences from observer bias and confounding variables.
Observation Types
Types of observation can be different, and it is sometimes difficult to differentiate them. The most common eight types are the following.
1. Naturalistic Observation
Here, an observer watches the participants’ behavior in their natural environment but does not interfere with them. An example is watching squirrels' behavior in the wildlife.
2. Participant Observation
This type is also common in real-life settings. However, a researcher becomes a part of the participants’ group for a certain time. For example, you can spend some time in the IT development office with a team of developers dealing with a specific project.
3. Systematic Observation
A researcher has to develop a clear observational schedule and a coding system to assess how often a phenomenon they are interested in happens. For instance, you can count the number of pizza portions students order in their canteen.
4. Covert Observation
Here, participants do not know that they are observed, so they behave naturally in their real-life settings. For example, you can observe interactions between sellers and buyers in a grocery store.
5. Quantitative Observation
You can watch some groups of participants and make inferences based on numerical data, like weight, height, or age.
6. Qualitative Observation
You observe with the help of your five senses - seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. Such observations are usually related to music, strange sounds, or colors. You can taste food in a restaurant or feel the textures of some fabrics at the textile factory.
7. Case Study
You watch an individual or group of people in their natural settings over time. Then, you can generalize your investigation results and transfer them to other people or participant groups. For example, you can observe an individual toddler or a group of young kids in a nursery school over the course of one day, week, or even month.
8. Archival Research
You spend your time at libraries, archives, or other types of repositories to find more information on your research question (normally related to the past). For example, you look for more information about the ingenuine folk clothing of a certain part of your country and where they originated from.
Observational Studies and Their Types
We can distinguish three major types of observational studies - cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies.
What Are Cohort Studies?
You apply cohort studies if you need to observe a group of participants for a longer time. The members of this group (or cohort) need to have one or several common characteristics, for example, people who prefer sweets to any other food. They can be watched for months or even years.
Application of Case-Control Studies
There are two groups in this study - a case study group and a control group. The case study group has the characteristics you are interested in, and the control group does not have them. You observe these two groups for a certain time and compare them to see whether the case group displays this characteristic much more often than the control group.
If you compare people who like sweets much (the case study group) with those who do not eat sweets at all (the control group), you can observe whether the sweet-tooth group shows more cases of obesity than the control group that does not eat sweets.
Ensure that you need to choose the case study group due to the characteristics they already possess for your case-control studies. In our example, it is eating sweets.
What Are Cross-Sectional Studies About?
You use this type when you want to research a population of your study at a certain point in time. So, you narrow down the preliminary collected data to this point in time to test whether the theory you want to apply and confirm in your research is appropriately chosen. For example, you can analyze how many people were diagnosed with obesity in May of this year. This observation is usually one-time, for instance, you may spend a day or two in the diabetologist’s surgery.
Layout and Example of the Observational Study
You need to follow specific steps in your observational study because it has to be pretty straightforward and understandable. It has also to be easy to design and implement. You may need a pen and paper at some events to take notes.
Step 1. Defining a Research Topic and the Purpose of the Observation
Start with identifying what you want to observe and why. You may not be able to do an experiment within the group of your interest because of some ethical or practical reasons or if your research is based on the natural conduct of the target population.
You are interested in interactions of primary school students during the breaks, such as their emotional reactions, using gadgets, live communication, and expressing negative attitudes. You cannot run an experiment here because young kids will not behave naturally when they know that they are observed. Moreover, you will have to get consent from their parents, and most of them may refuse because they believe that their kids are pretty vulnerable to external intrusions at this age.
Step 2. Opt for an Appropriate Type and Technique of the Observation
When you are thinking about the technique, take the following into account:
- Do you need to decide on what exactly you are going to observe beforehand, or you may do everything on the spot?
- Can you apply any other research method together with observation?
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Can the participants behave differently if they know that you are observing them?
If yes, you may need to implement a covert observation.
If not, think about the best way to observe the participants - from a distance or immediately participate in their activities. - How will you deal with confounding variables if they appear within the process, or can you prevent them somehow?
You can invent several ways to proceed with your observation of primary school students, depending on what exactly you want to include in your research topic:
- Conduct a naturalistic observation at the playground or inside the school premises.
- Spend a few weeks at the school to immerse yourself in the daily life of the children.
- Do a covert observation, hiding behind some obstacle so that the students cannot see you.
Anyway, you need to be organized and take your notes consistently or even develop specific templates to fill in while observing. Remember that you are observing the children in real time, and you will not have another chance to get the same data.
Step 3. Make a Detailed Plan for Your Observational Study
You have to consider and do several things before you start the observation:
- Plan your visit ahead of time. If it is a primary school in your area, contact some of them and ask them for a visit. They may refuse because your presence will not correspond with their schedule or curriculum, or the parents will not give their consent. So, you need some time to find the school that will let you do your observations.
- Decide how you are going to take notes. You cannot usually make video or audio records while observing because that may influence your participants’ behavior. So, you need to take notes, so make a scheme of how you are going to do that beforehand.
- If you still need recording, ask for consent from the participants or their parents. You may face different challenges, so this technique is not appropriate in many cases.
Step 4. Do Your Observation on the Site
You can start your observation only after you have decided on its type, techniques, time, and place.
You have decided that you want to observe how much primary school students use their gadgets during breaks and how they communicate with each other via their gadgets. Let’s assume that your hypothesis is that young kids do not use technology as much as their older counterparts because they are too lively and want to move a lot.
So, you split the kids by age or class - some are younger, and they will be your case group, and some are older, and they will make up a control group. You are interested in supporting your hypothesis about younger kids being more willing to move around and play noisy games than older ones. So, you have to spend a day or several days in a row at the playground during the school breaks, observing how the students in your case and control groups behave and how often they use their gadgets.
You need to be careful about the appearance of confounding variables. In this case, the weather can be one of them. If the weather is bad, the students will not go out to the playground for breaks but stay inside. If they cannot play and run about, their use of gadgets is likely to increase. There are some other factors that can play a role here, for example, the common interest of all the students in something like a new cartoon or the project their teacher assigned.
Step 5. Make an Analysis of the Obtained Data
Try to record your primary and final thoughts and impressions immediately after you have completed your observation. You may also consider some follow-up questions or additional points to research that appeared throughout your observation. If you have used video or audio recording, transcribe all the records.
You can use an inductive or deductive approach to your analysis. If you did not have a well-designed plan for your observation and did it in an open-ended way, an inductive approach would be more appropriate because it would help you to formulate the themes more accurately. If you observed the group with the pre-determined hypotheses in mind, use a deductive approach to see whether the collected data supports or contradicts them. You can also make a thematic or content analysis. Most observational studies are open-ended to a certain extent, so the thematic analysis will fit their purpose better.
Step 6. Determine the Paths for Future Research
Your observational study may be pretty exploratory in its nature. You do not have to consider it as a reliable basis for standalone conclusions because of the possible researcher bias and confounding variables that may have appeared from nowhere. That is why take into account that your research at this stage shows more association than causation.
However, you may find your preliminary conclusions interesting and believe that they need more support. So, you will choose to continue with this study, though you need to think about some other method to proceed with, for example, an experiment.
Observational Studies and Their Benefits and Drawbacks
| ✔️ The information about the difficult-to-research themes can be obtained easily and cost-effectively. | ❌ Observational studies cannot be used as the only source of data because there is always a risk of unexpected confounding or omitted variables and the influence of the researcher’s bias. |
| ✔️ You will be able to study the things that cannot be safely and ethically randomized. | ❌ These studies can be the basis for further research only but not the source of conclusive results because their outcomes are not generalizable or externally valid. |
| ✔️ The layout is pretty straightforward when you observe the participants’ behavior or research pre-existing points. | ❌ The observations cannot provide completely satisfying results because they cannot provide statements on the efficiency of treatments and influences but just produce assumptions about the reactions. |
| ✔️ You can develop further experimental designs and larger-scale trials based on the observations. |
The Difference Between an Observational Study and an Experiment
The most important difference between an observational study and an experiment is that even the most accurately conducted observations cannot influence the results or responses, while experimental designs always mean some kind of treatment used for one group of participants.
Observational studies are mostly used when it is impossible to affect the behavior or condition of the participants. It may be dangerous, unethical, or impractical. This can refer to medical studies where you cannot intervene with the health conditions of the patients. Or it is applicable in longitudinal analyses when you cannot do experiments with your groups over their lifetime.
You may also choose an observational study when you understand that you will not be able to distribute the participants into treatment and control groups. Nevertheless, you have to be ready for certain issues related to validity, conclusiveness, and the sudden appearance of confounding variables. They do not allow an observation to be as valid and reliable as an experiment. That is why if you can see that it is possible to randomize the participants without breaking any rules and ethical principles or your research question needs causation, think about using an experiment rather than an observational study.
Final Thoughts
You can assume that an observational study is easy to conduct, less time and effort-consuming, and more practical. However, it may not bring the desired results and prevent the researcher from making valid conclusions. The truth is somewhere in-between.
An observational study is a good research design in many cases when you cannot access the population you are interested in or making experiments does not seem ethical or practical. You can observe many different sides of the same subject and make preliminary conclusions that will become a consistent basis for further experimental research.