Observations, experiments and PaR

1. Observations,
Experiments and PaR
DISSERTATION AND PRACTICE AS RESEARCH
Week
8
Dissertation
and
Practice
as
Research

2. Observations are useful for…
• In depth analyses of behaviours in adults, children, events, phenomena
• Testing theory in real-life or simulated settings
Week 8
Dissertation and Practice as Research

3. Observations
Disadvantages
 They can be time consuming
 It can be difficult to find willing
participants
 It can be hard to generate useful
information
 There are complex ethical issues
 The findings can be highly subjective
and difficult to generalise from
Week 8
Dissertation and Practice as Research
Advantages
 They can yield rich information
 You gain a more immediate sense of
the subject, context, and how multiple
variable interact
 You gain insights into aspects that you
might not anticipate when designing
the project

4. Structured Observations
 Purpose
 Decide what you want to find out through the observation – and why
 Focus
 Isolate which particular behaviours you will focus on for your observation
 For example, how often a teacher offers praise and for what
 Or, how participants behave or respond to particular types of creative tasks
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

5. Structured Observations
 Definitions
 What counts?
 ‘Praise’ for example, might seem an easy thing to count but this can be offered
in distinct ways
 Define exactly what would constitute praise.
 A nod and smile?
 Or the use of particular words?
 Would a distracted repetition of the word ‘excellent’ count as praise?
 Does it matter if the intended recipient hears or acknowledges the praise?
 Should different kinds of praise be counted separately?
Week 8
Dissertation and Practice as Research

6. Structured Observations
 Feasibility
 Consider how feasible it will be to capture what you aim to record.
 Will you be able to see and hear each occurrence?
 Would you be able to record one occurrence without missing others?
 How many phenomena can you keep track of during a single session?
 Measurement
 Decide on a realistic method for measuring the phenomena. Will this be:
 A frequency count: how many times does something occur during the observation?
 A duration count: for how long does it last? For what % or proportion of the total times
that the observation took place?
Week 8
Dissertation and Practice as Research

7. Structured Observations
Date Start Time Incidences of target behaviour Total
26/8/13 07.00 |||| |||| || 12
26/8/13 11.00 |||| 4
26/8/13 15.00 |||| | 6
26/8/13 19.00 |||| |||| ||| 13
Week 8
Dissertation and Practice as Research
Observation recording form
Target behaviour: A sparrow lands on the bird table and successfully
accesses seed from the bird feeder.
Observation Time = 1 hour

8. Structured Observations
Date Time Gets up
from desk
without
permission
Flaps hands
in front of
face
Taps pencil
on desk
Rocks back
and forth in
seat
02/09/13 9.30-10.00 ||| |||| ||||
|
|||| | |||| ||||
02/09/13 2.00-2.30 |||| |||| ||| || |||| ||||
03/09/13 9.30-10.00 ||| | ||||
03/09/13 2.30-3.00 || |||| ||||
|||
||| |||| ||||
|
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Dissertation and Practice as Research
Behavioural observation form

9. Unstructured Observations
 Select the context for research
 Choose one that, in the time available, you can get to know sufficiently well to
understand its complex nuances
 Identify your role
 Will you participate? If so, how? How will you balance ‘joining in’ with the
research itself?
 Objectivity
 Select contexts, roles, themes which allow you to hold an objective perspective
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

10. Unstructured Observations
 Justify your choices
 You cannot focus on, nor note down, everything that takes place.
 Of necessity, you will have to choose, or acknowledge that there will be gaps in your
recording.
 Consider carefully in advance how you will make such choices once you are
conducting the observation.
 What kinds of behaviours or situations might arise for you to note?
 How would choose between those?
 For example, will you select one or more people to track throughout the
observation? Will you decide these in advance or at the start of the observation? Or
will you select specific events to note in detail, if and when these occur?
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

11. Unstructured Observations
 Recording your observations
 Decide how you will keep records during the observation. For example, will you:
 Jot down detailed notes of what arises at the time, selecting relevant aspects later for
analysis?
 Make focused notes on selected themes whilst you observe?
 Observe without making notes, and then write up observations immediately
afterwards?
 Make a recording to use alongside the observation?
 Combine several methods?
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

12. Experiments are useful for…
• Investigating cause and effect, when the variables can be tightly
controlled
• Testing theory in controlled conditions, demonstrating that results are
consistent with a theory of hypothesis; experiments cannot fully disprove a
theory (as a further experiment might have different results)
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

13. Experiments
Disadvantages
 Ecological validity: your findings may not
be applicable outside the controlled
conditions of the experiment. It may still
be useful to conduct the research, if it
throws light on the topic
 There may be resource constraints in
accessing labs and equipment
 Experiments often do not go to plan
 In can require much patience, waiting
for an experiment to run its course
 When participants are involved, it is
harder to control the conditions
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Dissertation and Practice as Research
Advantages
 There are many long established, well-
documented methods to draw upon.
 Experiments can be relatively easy to
manage for scale, scope, costs, time
constraints, and other risks, as you have
more control over the conditions
 They enable accurate data collection
 Finding can contribute to a broader
database of results, which helps to
establish the likelihood of a theory being
sound, and with drawing generalisations

14. Planning your experiment
 The design challenge
 Look at the design details of experiments that you have as part of your course
 Read the methods sections of journal articles relevant to your discipline
 Consider which methods you might be able to adapt for your own research
 What are you really measuring?
 That doing X causes Y…
 To the extent that you say it does…
 And that nothing else caused Y
 Other factors, variables, that were not intended to be part of the experiment
 Control groups
 A group that do not receive the experiment to measure for difference
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

15. Practice as research is useful for…
• Investigating through creative practice, a pre-determined theoretical or
technical issue (practice-based)
• Investigating an artistic hunch, intuition, or question, or an artistic or
technical concern generated by the researcher’s own practice (practice
led)
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

16. Practice as Research
Disadvantages
 Difficult to document
 What counts as valid research?
 Time constraints
 It can be difficult to find willing
participants
 Creative processes can be
idiosyncratic
 The findings can be highly subjective
and difficult to generalise from
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Dissertation and Practice as Research
Advantages
 Advances knowledge in the arts
 Inquiry based, stemming from a place
of exploration
 It can yield rich artistic insights
 You gain a more immediate sense of
the practice, context, and how
multiple variable interact
 You gain insights into aspects that you
might not anticipate when designing
the project

17. Practice as Research
Practice led
 What would happen if…?
 Would it be possible to…?
 How might I resolve this artistic gap I am
facing?
 A precise research question may not be
formulated prior to the project, but may be
generated later by the researcher’s practice
as their creative investigation into the artistic
intuition or concern progresses
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Dissertation and Practice as Research
Practice based
 An investigation through practice of certain
aspects of (say) Butler’s gender theory to
choreography or performance
 An interrogation through practice of a claim
made by a practitioner or theorist concerning
the nature of theatre-making
 An investigation of documentation in dance,
which uses specially created work as a means
of testing old, and developing new modes of
documentation
 An investigation into the efficacy of particular
methods of teaching acting

18. Documentation
 Video
 Journalling
 Reflection in/on-practice
 Schön’s reflective practitioner
 Gibbs’ reflective cycle
 Kolb’s learning theory
 Price and Maier’s 3R approach
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

19. Reflective Practice
 In an academic context, it is worth thinking of the
quality of reflective writing as being on a continuum
from rather superficial writings that are largely
descriptive, to much deeper writings in which the
questioning is more profound.
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

20. Reflective Practice
 Descriptive writing: Writing that is not considered to show evidence of
reflection: it is a description with no discussion beyond description.
 Descriptive reflection: There is description of events. The possibility of
alternative view-points is accepted but most reflection is from one
perspective.
 Dialogic reflection: There is a recognition that different qualities of judgement
and alternative explanations may exist for the same material. The reflection is
analytical or integrative, though may reveal inconsistency.
 Critical reflection: ‘Demonstrates an awareness that actions and events are
not only located within and explicable by multiple perspectives, but are
located in and influenced by multiple historical and socio-political contexts.’
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Dissertation and Practice as Research

21. Reflective Practice
 Engaging in a reflective process is often compared to a self-meditative
process and many advocate taking time to ‘return to the lived-
experience’ by taking your awareness to your bodily sensations.
Week 8
Dissertation and Practice as Research
• Take your attention into this very moment.
• Suspend your main flow of thought.
• Call your attention to your body and what it is experiencing (are you short of breath, is your
back hurting, are you hungry?)
• Witness what you see, hear, and touch, how space feels, and temperature, and how the inside of
your body feels in relation to the outside. Are there others around you? What thoughts enter
your mind once you suspend the main rational thrust? Register any seemingly trivial
anxieties or thoughts but do not try to delve into their deeper significance at this moment. Let
your mind wander and notice lateral associations. Your sense-data retrieval depends on your
context. Do what seems appropriate. Spend some time getting in touch with your senses.
Identify whether some dominate. Spend more time. Push beyond your boredom threshold and
see what transpires. Notice whether any conceptual or high-level thought begin to take form,
and register these but do not pursue them at this time.

22. Reflective Practice
 But how does one write about such experiences? One method is called
‘stream-of-consciousness writing where the aim of the task is to avoid
stopping and thinking about what has been written or passing judgement
on what is written as it is written.
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Dissertation and Practice as Research
Rules
1. Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written.
That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)
2. Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you
didn’t mean to write, leave it.)
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying
within the margins and lines on the page.)
4. Lose control.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that
is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)
(Goldberg, 2005, pp. 10-11)

23. Reflective Practice
 We may want to use some questions to help direct our attention to our
experience. We can consider in what ways our experience may be
biased.
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Dissertation and Practice as Research
• Out of the description, what is the issue / are the issues that could be addressed
in reflective writing?
• How do you feel about it?
• How do your feelings relate to any action?
• What other information do you need (ideas, knowledge, opinion etc)?
• Are there others, or the views of others who are relevant to this matter – and in
what way?
• Has the nature of your description of the issue / event (etc) influenced the
manner in which you have gone about the reflective writing?
• Is there relevant formal theory that you need to apply?
• Does this issue relate to other contexts – reflection on which may be helpful?
• Are there ethical / moral / wider social issues that you would want to explore?

24. Reflective Practice
 Lastly, we can reexamine our
reflections by analysing any
thematic meanings. Thematic
reflection can provide a
measure of control and a
sense of order in our research
and writing. Set yourself the
task of further research into
ideas that relate to your
experience.
Dissertation and Practice as Research Week 8