The experimenter who plunges into a lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming research effort without extensive prior knowledge of his or her subjects and their probable behaviors will not be likely to plunge more than once. Observation can help us generate hypotheses and predictions about behavior. It can also help us to select alternative approaches to the study of behavior. Although observation is frequently preliminary to a more extensive investigation, it need not be.
Observational techniques can either wholly or partially constitute the entire investigation.
Her six categories of social participation have remained the major descriptors of summaries of developmental play more than 50 years later. In summary, naturalistic observations may be formal or informal. They may be preliminary or part of the final procedure. They may constitute all or only part of a complete study. Finally, they may be highly structured or almost totally unstructured.