Field Research Strengths

According to the course text, here are many strengths and weakness of field research. These strengths and weakness include: validity, reliability, and generalizability. Conducting field studies of behavior is more appropriate than trying to measure behavior through surveys. For example, the counts of seatbelts use or theft by shoppers obtain through observation are not subject to the effects of social desirability that we may expect in survey questions about those specific behaviors. Next, flexibility is another advantage of field research. Researchers can modify their research design as often as they would like. Significantly, qualitative research is a superior method for studying active offenders. In addition, combining qualitative interviewers and observations combine offender’s perspectives and systematic measures collected by researches (Babbie & Maxfield, 2013). Although, it is possible to study arrested or convicted offenders in other settings. Field research offers many …show more content…
The first weakness is, qualitative field studies often yield precise descriptive statements about large populations (Babbie & Maxfield, 2013). The second weakness is, field observation can develop systematic counts of behavior and reasonable estimates of large population of behaviors beyond those that are actually observed. In addition, it is difficult to know the total population of a given phenomenon. When designing quantitative field study or assessing the representativeness of another study. The researcher should think carefully about the density and the predictability of what will be observed. Then after that, the researcher must decide on if sampling procedures are possible to tap representative instances of cases they will observe (Babbie & Maxfield, 2013). In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of various types of field studies can be considered in the terms of their validity, reliability, and