Observational studies

[PsychResearch]

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What is everyone's experience with observational studies? I started grad school straight from undergrad. As un undergraduate I worked as an RA and helped code tapes. When I got into grad school I sold myself as being interested in observation research. At the time, my advisor had lots of tapes to be coded and needed someone to supervise the task. Long story short, the coding did not go anywhere as i got busy doing other stuff in the lab that had priority.

In the meantime, we started a new grant 3 years + ago. I helped design the observation task for this new grant and my supervisor kept me on the task since she knew i was interested. Well, I am now a senior student..hoping to get my first paper out by March. I know lots more about research now and developed other interests that do not require observation. I can easily do what I want with questionnaire data.

What are your opinions about the payoff of using observation vs. self report?
Coding the tapes will take lots of effort and team work. we have limited personnel resources and good undergrads were taken off the coding task to take over grad task.
I have yet to publish an empirical article and I almost feel as if someone new needs to take over this. Someone who is starting out fresh and will be around until the end of the project.
I just don't know if giving this up is a good/bad idea. At this point what I need to focus is my dissertation and publishing 1 or 2 papers before applying for a post doc.

Any thoughts and word of advice is appreciate it. 😕

 

[docma]

Observational studies (and longitudinal studies) have much more credibility for me and represent a qualitatively different level of science. Over the long term, I think having done something like that has serious worth and depth.

It does sound like you are getting some "burn out"--so consulting on that and seeing what you need to do to get done and into the next phase with some sense of creativity still intact is worth doing.

 

[Ollie123]

Well, its like any technique...it can be used well, or it can be used poorly.

Personally, I don't think there is any question that "Self-report only" is a massive limitation...and (in my opinion) is usually a weaker approach except in those rare circumstances where there are serious limitations that make other methods impossible to use. There is a big difference between "can" be done using self-report, and "should" be done using self-report. Pretty much every study my lab does looks across at least 2, often 3 modalities (self-report, behavior, physiological). I don't think it makes much sense in research to identify by a particular technique...I take a "Learn what you need to learn to answer the questions you are asking in the most thorough way possible" approach. Its inevitable that people will "specialize" and perhaps know more about one than another, but it seems silly to limit oneself to a particular method.

Don't let it hold you back, but I think it looks good to leave grad school showing that you are capable of research that consists of more than just self-report (that goes double if these are non-experimental self-report studies, i.e. surveys). If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail....