Ninth Edition CoverGraziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)

Designing Naturalistic and
Case-Study Research

Designing naturalistic and case-study research involves recognizing the issues implicit in your questions about the world and finding ways of gathering the data that will help to clarify the question. Try your hand at some of the questions that are described below.

  1. You are interested in the reasons why some high school coaches are effective, in that their teams usually win, whereas other coaches are ineffective. You have permission to attend practices, observe games, and talk to players for several teams in a given conference.

  2. You are struck by the fact that young men and women seem to experience dramatic changes over the few weeks of basic training in the armed services. You see changes in attitudes, behavior, and outlook. You want to study this process more carefully to understand what may be going on.

  3. As someone who wants to eventually go into teaching, you have always worried about the kids that seem to be the targets of bullies and other kids who seem to be too shy to participate in class. You want to identify and understand the factors that may be contributing to these problems.

  4. You want to study the interactions between men and women who are strangers. You are especially interested in flirting behavior and behavior apparently designed to establish an initial contact. You not only want to know how the contacts are established, but whether there are ways in which interested parties communicate their interest to others.

  5. You are a new parent, and the bundle of joy that is your new child overwhelms you. But you are also the inquisitive type, and you want to understand how this brilliant being begins to make sense out of the world. In particular, you want to understand how your child learns to communicate desires and needs to others and learns to identify who is most likely to satisfy those desires and needs.