Sometimes it's useful knowledge that you can use to better understand things, but sometimes it's mixed with confounds which make it impossible to consume. The task of observational research is one of abstraction of commonalities. The researcher comes up with axis labels which show systematic and reliable functions. Identification of functional relationships. This tends to be describing events and measuring the capacity of the organism.
Methods vary along a dimension of constraint or structure.
Simply watching something in order to see what is going on is relatively unstructured, conceptually demanding, and holds the potential of being the most productive. While at the other extreme, a check sheet is very structured, conceptually easy, but often tells us little more than we already know. As with all research, the focus could be on the behavior and functional relations at face value only, or the intent could be to see the behavior as an instance of a more general process. This is simply observing nature exactly as it occurs. The observer must hope that the data obtained are relevant and that the observation itself did not affect the behavior.