Naturalistic Observation, Survey, And Case Study

The three descriptive research methods that I will discuss are Naturalistic Observation, Survey, and Case Study. Naturalistic Observation is a research method in which people or animals are observed in their natural habitat without any controls or variables. This type of research method may be conducted if you want to see how people truly act without being watched. For example, this research method may be used to determine who are healthier shoppers, men or women? The researcher would go to a food store and take count throughout the day of how many men and women he finds in the fruit and vegetable isles, and how many he find in the snack isles. The main strength of conducting this experiment is that is shows the behavior exactly as it occurs in the real world.

An advantage of conducting a Survey is that it allows the researcher to collect a large amount of data over a short period of time. They can also be created and administered quickly and easily. A disadvantage of a Survey is that often times the answer choice on a survey may not reflect the participants true opinion. Case Study is a research method in which is single person is directly observed. This study is an open ended type of data collection. Case studies are often conducted in clinical medicine involving descriptive info about the person. For example, if a person was in the hospital for a particular reason that the doctor cannot yet identify, the patient may be asked a serious of questions about their health and activities to try and determine what is making them ill. The strength of performing a case study is that it allows a researcher to investigate a topic in much more detail than if they were dealing with large amounts of people. Case studies have been said to provide more of a realistic response than other types of methods. The weakness of a case study is that because only one person is being studied, there is only one viewpoint being contributed to the study. This may