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PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
A Sample of One
Training Handout
Live with the people
The author
of a text book, Henslin, wanted to make observations about homeless
people.
His method was participant observation.
He wanted to
live with them and to experience what they experienced, and to find out
what they themselves thought about the meanings of what they were
doing.
He could not
live with more than one homeless group at a time, so his sample consisted
of only one community among the thousands that exist throughout North America
and the rest of the world.
If we knew
for sure that every homeless community was radically different from every
other one, then the validity of his findings would be very low.
If we believe,
as we do, that there are many similarities between those communities, his
validity would be very high, much higher, for example, than if he went
around with a clipboard asking questions from a questionnaire.
(See that the
method and the sampling technique are not as unrelated as one might first
imagine both in combination contribute to the level of validity).
The text book
gives an example of a population being all the students of a university,
and a sample being those interviewed with a questionnaire.
How do you choose that sample?
Do
you ask every fifth person walking down a particular hallway?
Will that bias
your sample towards students taking those subjects taught in the rooms
in that hallway?
Would that bias affect the results?
If you were
asking questions where there might be significantly different answers from
students taking one subject, rather than another, then that method of sampling
would bias the result.
He
suggests that a random sample would be most valid.
So how do you choose a sample that is random?
Here
you might exercise your imagination, initiative and creativity.
How
much a proportion of the population should the sample be so that it is
valid?
If you interview
only ten people out of a population of several thousand, perhaps the results
would not be as valid as it might be if you interviewed a sample of one
thousand.
My
PhD research was based mainly on participant observation. See Why
Obo? My selection of a sample, one community, was far from
random.
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