Observation
There are three kinds of observation. In naturalistic observation, researchers watch, as unobtrusively as possible, subjects going about their lives. Their purpose is to gather information without influencing the behavior being studied. In cases where this is not practical, researchers sometimes employ participant observation, in which observers participate in the behavior being studied. An example would be an anthropological study in which a researcher travels to New Guinea and lives with a Stone Age tribe. In structured observation, researchers create specific circumstances and then observe their effects on subjects. An example would be a study that created a racially and ethnically mixed baseball team and entered it into an existing league in order to study how the players perform and interrelate.