Devising a schedule-for the recording of observations is clearly a crucial step in the structured observation project. The considerations that go into this phase are very similar to those involved in producing a structured interview schedule. The following considerations are worth taking into account.
• A clear focus is necessary. There are two aspects to this point. First, it should be clear to the observer exactly who or what (and possibly both) is to be observed. For example, if people are the focus of attention, the observer needs to know precisely who is to be observed. Also, the observer needs to know which if any aspects of the setting are to be observed and hence recorded. The second sense in which a clear focus is necessary is that the research problem needs to be clearly stated so that the observer knows which of the many things going on in any setting are to be recorded.
• As with the production of a closed question for a structured interview schedule or self-completion questionnaire, the forms taken by any category of behaviour must be both mutually exclusive (that is, not overlap) and inclusive. Taking the earlier example of coding behaviour in a university tutorial, we might conceivably run into a problem of the thirteen categories not being exhaustive if a student knocks on the tutor’s door and quickly asks him or her a question (perhaps about the tutorial topic if the student is from another of the tutor’s groups). An observer unfamiliar with the ways of university life might well be unsure about whether this behaviour needs to be coded in terms of the thirteen categories or whether the coding should be temporarily suspended. Perhaps the best approach would be to have another category of behaviour to be coded that we might term ‘interruption’. It is often desirable for a certain amount of unstructured observation to take place before the construction of the observation schedule and for there to be some piloting of it, so that possible problems associated with a lack of inclusiveness can be anticipated.
• The recording system must be easy to operate. Complex systems with large numbers of types of behaviour will be undesirable. Much like interviewers using a structured interview schedule, observers need to be trained, but even so it is easy for an observer to become flustered or confused if faced with too many options
• One possible problem with some observation schedules is that they sometimes require a certain amount of interpretation on the part of the observer. For example, it might be difficult to distinguish between a student responding to a question raised by another student and discussing the tutorial topic. To the extent that it may be difficult to distinguish between the two, a certain amount of interpretation on the part of the observer may be required. If such interpretation is required, there would need to be clear guidelines for the observer, and considerable experience would be required (see Research in focus 12.2 for an illustration of a study in which a good deal of interpretation seems to have been necessary).
Research in focus 12.2
Observing jobs
Jenkins et al. (1975) report the results of an exploratory study employed to measure the nature of jobs. The research focused on several different types of job in a number of different types of organization. An observation schedule was devised to assess the nature of twenty aspects (dimensions) of the jobs in question. Most of the dimensions were measured through more than one indicator, each of which took the form of a question that observers had to answer on a six-or seven-point scale. These were then aggregated for each dimension. While the research has a predominantly psychological slant, many of the twenty dimensions relate to issues that have been raised in the sociology of work by labour process theorists and other (e.g. Braverman 1974). One dimension relates to ‘Worker pace control’ and comprises three observational indicators such as:
How much control does the employee have in setting the pace of his or her work?
Another dimension was ‘Autonomy’, which comprised four items, such as:
The job allows the individual to make a lot of decisions on his or her own.
Most of the observers were university students. The procedure for conducting the observations was as follows: ‘Each respondent was observed twice for an hour. The observations were scheduled so that the two different observations were separated by at least 2 days, were usually made at different times of the day, and were always made by two different observers’ (Jenkins et al. 1975: 173).