Lareau's Observational Data Analysis

To start, I think naturalistic observation is a great research method. Observational data gives a real-world perspective on information that might not be possible in a lab setting, and is usually able to easily generate ecologically valid information. However, the method which Lareau recruited her 12 families has extreme problems of invalidity because she chose 3 families to fill empty categories in her study that came from outside of her sample. That might not seem like a problem. However, by choosing families in that way she could creating large amounts of variance because those 3 families could be from a different population. When data is collected from two populations, you can get a weird distribution of the information that can influence data in weird ways that is not …show more content…
Every single family in sample is incredibly important because any of them could have a significant outlier potential that makes her observational data possible look even more weird. However, the most troubling issue is probably the fact that a couple of the families do not align well with the original 9 families that were randomly selected. To go into specifics, the Williams family is part of a very high income bracket (240,000$ gross income) way above all the other families, and Alexander went to neither Swan nor Lower Richmond. The Marshall family’s daughter Stacy had already finished 5th grade by the time they consented to the study. Lareau did not write a key difference for the Greeley family. But, Alexander Williams and Stacy Marshall could have a massive impact on her analyses. Lareau does acknowledge the pitfalls of her sampling and wrote in Appendix A, “with a nonrandom population, one cannot generalize from these results to the broader population.” By writing that it means that her information should not be generalized. This does not mean it cannot be a part of someone’s personal assumptions, but I think that should be limit of what her information can