Teaching Socio-Legal Research Methodology: Participant Observation

Doing participant observation in a psychiatric hospital-- research ethics resumed.

Social scientists who employ participant observation methods in medical settings are often held accountable for their research methods, specifically in regard to medical research ethics. However, the medical research ethics tradition rubs uneasily against participant observation and the anthropological understanding of the research process. The underlying premise for considering research ethics...

Challenges of Introducing Participant Observation to Community Health Research

Participant observation elicits unique observation data from both an insider's and an outsider's perspectives. Despite the growing tendency to adopt participant observation strategies in health care research regarding health-related beliefs and types of behavior, the use of participant observation in current research is mostly limited to structured clinical settings rather than community settin...

Observation in Poverty Research Observation as a Critical Methodology

Caseworkers and clients often have varying interpretations of key events including, for example, how program eligibility guidelines were explained, how assessments were performed, why sanctions were imposed, and reasons for case closures. Both caseworker and client reports can be subject to errors in recall, and biased towards providing socially desirable answers to sensitive questions. Casewor...

Using participant or non-participant observation to explain information behaviour

The aim of the paper is to provide guidance on conducting participant and non-participant observation studies of information behaviour. Examines lessons learned during nonparticipant observation of hospital pharmacists, and participant observation with dependent older people living in their own homes. Describes the methods used in both studies, and discusses the ethical issues involved in gaini...

Teaching Advanced Legal Research in a Flipped Classroom