Participant Observation Procedures in Marital and Family Assessment

Abstract

the term "participant observation," in its general usage, refers to assessment procedures in which the observer is clearly visible to the person being observed / in marital and family literature, that definition covers three types of observation procedures /// first, there have been direct observations by noninteractive and uninvolved trained coders, that is, objective observation by a "blend-into-the-woodwork" type of observer / second, there are observations that family members make of one another during the natural course of daily interactions / third are observations in which the person doing the reporting is also the target of the observation (or is one of several targets) / this observation is an example of self-monitoring /// this chapter focuses on the latter two assessment procedures: observations of oneself or of another family member (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)