Child Psychology: What Is Naturalistic Approch ?

What is a naturalistic experiment? 

What is naturalistic approach?

As many other observational methods naturalistic approach is also being used to observe the topic. The naturalistic experimentation is a method used by psychologists that includes noticing the children in their own home setting. “The biggest advantage of the naturalistic method of research is that researchers view participants in their natural environments” (Hale J, 2011). The investigator tries not to interfere, recording things as accurately as possible. This method was first used by psychologist Roger Brown for observing language development in infants. “Naturalistic observation refers to the collection of data without manipulation of the environment”. (http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~ps202vc/PDF/NaturalisticObservation.pdf). Forexample a psychologist who is developing a theory about mentally ill children in social setting, he needs to observe them at home, classroom or in playground.   But the subject always knows that they are being watched.

Some of the advantages of this technique are

    • People incline to act normally.
    • Data that is collected is rich and full.
    • Can be used where other methods are not possible
    • Replication is not possible.

Naturalistic observational studies:

Let’s discuss some of the studies on infant language development that uses naturalistic observational method.

Roger W. Brown (1925-1997), was the first psychologist to use naturalistic observational method to observe the infants for language acquisition; his studies in the 1960s raised the earliest understanding of how children acquire basic sentence structures in English. He used the longitudinal study on adam, eve and sarah, by taking their recording from their home every two weeks. Eve was visited from age 18m to 26m, Adam from 27m to 42m, Sarah from 27m to 48m. He closely observed the communication of mother and child. According to him a child omits some words when he imitates his...