By Mrs Harrold (Head of Psychology)

Last week, the Lower Sixth psychologists enjoyed themselves exercising their creativity whilst making stop motion cartoons of different types of observations.

Each group was assigned, via email, a 'secret' selection of 'designators' that is, a set of the technical terms used to describe the various ways of conducting observational studies. They each created a unique way of representing whether their observation was: controlled or naturalistic, participant or non-participant, overt or covert and structured or unstructured. This helped them to learn that any one observation will always need four of these terms to describe the research methodology being used!

Once the videos were finished, we presented them to the class and the students in the other groups had to try to identify which 'designators' described the observations in the cartoons. The classes did very well at identifying the nature of each study, showing how effectively the students represented their assigned observational type, despite only having between 22-25 minutes to film each video. More esoteric creative choices (such as the cartoon in which the researchers were a team made up of a cat and a baby!) did pose more difficulties in the final stage of the activity but also proved very entertaining, and we always like a challenge in Psychology.