Naturalistic Observation Report

Naturalistic observation is a way of observing applicants in their own natural environment without the contestants realizing the observers are present. My observation took me to different places and settings to complete my assignment where I observed the subjects’ reactions and further relate it with concepts of psychology. This assignment is going to look into the observation at different settings by watching people as they go about their normal activities in their own habitats, and will briefly describe the concepts of superego, egocentrism, operant conditioning, pretend play, and lack of conservation. These concepts are common between the ages 4-6 years of age. The paper will also analyze the interactions using a reflective approach on the psychology of young children.

The concept of superego plays an active role in our daily lives. Freud’s interpretation of superego is most simply understood in the natural observation when observing the participants in the school setting, where a boy around 5-6 years of age playing around with bunch of kids saw the $20 bill lying on the playground with no one around it. He took the money and turned it into the school office in case anyone came looking for it. He wouldn’t want to lose $20, and hoped that whoever had lost it would ask about it in the office which leads me to believe that the child may have an overly strong superego because of the fact that “Once the superego emerges, children have a parental voice in their head that keeps them from violating society’s rules and make them guilty or ashamed if they do” (Sigelman & Rider, 2012, p. 49). According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, the superego is the factor of personality composed of our internalized ideals that w...

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...rst step in a research program. In my observation, I studied different concepts of psychology that are critical in influencing a child development and understands different human behavior as they take place in a daily setting. This gave me an opportunity to notice the participant’s natural behavior, which reduces minimizes biases in my observation and also can be further used as a rich source of hypotheses. As one investigator commented, "The major strength of naturalistic observation is that it allows researchers to study behavior under conditions that are less artificial than in experiments” (Weiten, 2008, p. 347).

Works Cited

Sigelman, C. K., & Rider, E. A. (2011). Human development across the life-span (7th ed.). Belmont Calif: Wadsworth.

Weiten, W. (2010). Psychology: Themes & variations (8th ed.). Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.