Naturalistic Observation Report

First of all, the question we are going to explore is “Whether or not playing video games increase aggressive behavior in children?” The independent variable will be violent and nonviolent video games, and the dependent variable is how much aggression was demonstrated. I will be using the naturalistic observation and experimentation methods to answer this hypothesis. According to Openstak (2014) “the greatest benefit of natural observation is the validity, or accuracy of information collected unobtrusively in a natural setting.” (p.44) During the naturalistic observation we chose people who bought 10+E, M, and R rated games for nine year olds and under. We then came in under cover and observe the child inconspicuously. One disguise was an air conditioning man coming to check the AC. He was equipped with a clip board and pretended to check off the possible things wrong with the AC, but in actuality he was watching the child and recording their behavior. Another time we had a scientist set up a play date with the child, she took notes as she observed the interaction between the children. Furthermore we sent a …show more content…
The subjects at the summer camp were only tested for two months, so we have no way of knowing if they were already exposed to violent video games outside our test group. However, the experiment did adequately measure how much aggression was displayed. Pros for conducting and experiment is that we can control what happens to the subjects and use them as often as we liked. On the other hand we were at a void as to what happened with our subjects when they were home for the season, which could have altered our results. Seeing the kids in their natural state proved very helpful, since there were no barriers or interference. Nonetheless, we incorporated a diverse number of observers or inter-rater reliability to keep observer bias at a