Case Study and Field Study as research method in Environmental Psychology

 Case Studies - A case study is an in depth study of a specific situation. it’s a way used when a researcher really wants to narrow down a really broad topic of research into one single case, i.e., a person, setting, situation, or event. for instance, the broad topic of urban environmental quality could also be studied in one particular neighbourhood where the municipality has recently installed garbage bins to tackle littering. instead of employing a strict protocol and close ended inquiries to study a limited number of variables, case study methods involve an exploratory, qualitative examination of one situation or event: a case. Qualitative research uses words or other non numerical indicators (such as images or drawings) as data. the most purpose of case studies and other sorts of qualitative research is to explore and understand the meaning that individuals or groups ascribe to a phenomenon. during a case study, people or events are studied in their own context, within present settings, such as the home, playing fields, the university, and therefore the street. These settings are ‘open systems’ where conditions are continuously suffering from interactions with the social, physical, historical, and cultural context to offer rise to a process of ongoing change, including ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology (Wolcott 2001). Although there will not be one objective truth of the interpretation of the phenomenon (Willig 2001).

Field Studies – Many environmental psychologists use field investigations and experiments to obtain high external validity without sacrificing too much internal validity. Field experiments have a high level of external validity because they are conducted in real-life settings. Internal validity, on the other hand, is relatively high because the experimenter attempts to control the situation by systematically manipulating independent variables (e.g., placing or removing a bin from the environment) and/or by randomly assigning participants to different study conditions (e.g., environments with and without bins). Internal validity is ensured when researchers can be relatively certain that any variations between conditions are due to the manipulations (rather than, for example, personality differences). However, because field studies take place in real world situations, it’s impossible to account for confounding factors like changing weather or unexpected interruptions. Furthermore, random assignment is not achievable in many instances.

Subcribe on Youtube - IGNOU SERVICE

For PDF copy of Solved Assignment

WhatsApp Us - 9113311883(Paid)