Research Methods for Environmental Psychology E-Book

Robert Gifford

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 908

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Covering the full spectrum of methodology, the timely and indispensible Research Methods for Environmental surveys the research and application methods for studying, changing, and improving human attitudes, behaviour and well-being in relation to the physical environment.

• The first new book covering research methods in environmental psychology in over 25 years. Brings the subject completely up-to-date with coverage of the latest methodology in the field
• The level of public concern over the impact of the environment on humans is high, making this book timely and of real interest to a fast growing discipline
• Comprehensively surveys the research and application methods for studying, changing, and improving human attitudes, behavior, and well-being in relation to the physical environment
• Robert Gifford is internationally recognised as one of the leading individuals in this field, and the contributors include many of the major leaders in the discipline

Leseprobe

“The chapters in this volume offer a broad-gauged, in-depth overview of diverse research methods for studying and improving people’s relationships with their everyday surroundings. This book will be an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners working in the interdisciplinary fields of environmental psychology, urban planning, and environmental design research.

”Daniel Stokols, Ph.D., Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus,School of Social Ecology, University of California,Irvine, USA

“A highly accessible and long overdue book which sets the methods in context by starting with the problems environmental psychologists are trying to solve; it reflects what we tell our students to do – start with the problem and then explore the most appropriate methodology, not vice versa. An interesting choice of research methods have been selected that go beyond the normal suspects.

”David Uzzell, Professor of Environmental Psychology,University of Surrey, UK

“This is not only a volume on research methods, but an invaluable book showing the incredible richness and potential of the still growing field of environmental psychology.

”Mirilia Bonnes, Professor of Social andEnvironmental Psychology, SapienzaUniversity of Rome, Italy

“As economic and global climate changes press human health and the human spirit, insights about how to study the role of the physical environment in human behavior are more critical than ever. This volume provides up-to-date overviews of multiple methodological approaches to studying human–environment relations. The collective wisdom and experiences of the chapter authors reflect well on environmental psychology. Professionals, scholars, and advanced students interested in people and the environment will repeatedly rely on this volume.

”Gary W. Evans, Elizabeth Lee VincentProfessor of Human Ecology,Cornell University, USA

“In this much-needed book research methods are introduced in a fun way without overly simplifying the topics, which should appeal to both students and teachers. The uniquely broad coverage of different research methods in environmental psychology will be very useful for academic courses.

”Tommy Gärling, Emeritus Professor of Psychology,University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Research Methods for Environmental Psychology

Edited by

Robert Gifford

This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gifford, Robert, editor.Title: Research methods for environmental psychology / edited by Robert Gifford.Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015031981 (print) | LCCN 2015039975 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781118795330 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118795385 (pbk.) |  ISBN 9781118795415 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118795453 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Environmental psychology–Research.Classification: LCC BF353.R46 2015 (print) | LCC BF353 (ebook) | DDC 155.9072/1–dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031981

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: © fotoVoyager/iStockphoto

Contributors

Wokje Abrahamse Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Paul A. Bell Colorado State University, CO, United States

Navjot Bhullar University of New England, NSW, Australia

David Canter University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Angel Chen University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Victor Corral-Verdugo Universidad de Sonora, Mexico

Valeria Cortés University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Thomas Doherty Lewis and Clark Graduate School, OR, United States

Jay Farbstein Jay Farbstein & Associates, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Martha Frias-Armenta Universidad de Sonora, Mexico

E. Scott Geller Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA, United States

Robert Gifford University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Harneet K. Gill Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Branda Guan University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Donald W. Hine University of New England, NSW, Australia

Christine Kormos University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Anthony D. G. Marks University of New England, NSW, Australia

Mark Martin Optimal Environments, Inc., FL, United States

Lindsay J. McCunn University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Amanda McIntyre University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Taciano L. Milfont Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Daniel R. Montello University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, United States

Cheuk Fan Ng Athabasca University, AB, Canada

P. Wesley Schultz California State University, San Marcos, CA, United States

David Seamon Kansas State University, KS, United States

Jennifer Senick Rutgers University, NJ, United States

Arthur E. Stamps III Institute of Environmental Quality, San Francisco, CA, United States

Linda Steg University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Robert Sommer University of California, Davis, CA, United States

Reuven Sussman University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Richard E. Wener New York University, NY, United States

John Zeisel Hearthstone Alzheimer Care, United States

1Introduction: Environmental Psychology and its Methods

Robert Gifford

University of Victoria, BC, Canada

How did we get here? I don’t mean biologically; I mean to the point where we are sharing a book about how to do research in environmental psychology. You will have your story; here is mine. Like many others, I was initially drawn to psychology because of its potential to help people with emotional and cognitive difficulties. I entered graduate school as a student in clinical psychology, even though I had worked as an undergraduate assistant for a professor (Robert Sommer) who was curious about such things as how people tended to space themselves from others and whether one’s choice of study areas influenced academic performance. These studies were driven partly by pure curiosity about how humans operate in their daily environments, and partly by the goal of informing environmental design from the person outward rather than from the building inward. Put another way, these studies sought to discover fundamental principles of human behavior, which could then be translated into practice by talented designers, who would create people-centered optimal environments.

I slowly realized that I was more suited and more interested in these questions and goals than I was in being a clinical psychologist. At about the same time, in the late 1960s, what we had been doing acquired a name, environmental psychology.1 In some senses, having a name makes something real, or at least more real. Activity becomes legitimized, recognized, and organized. After dropping out of graduate school (I also dropped out of kindergarten, but that is another story) and contemplating my future in a cabin on a remote island that had no electricity or running water, or even any furniture, I knew I had to be engaged in discovering the principles and aiding the practice as an environmental psychologist. I went back to graduate school, and here I am, 45 years later.

Why this personal story? Frankly, it is an attempt to connect with you, the reader, who also probably did not enter your post-secondary education with a ringing declaration that “I want to be an environmental psychologist!” Your story undoubtedly differs from mine in its details, but I suspect that in broad terms it is the same. At some point you discovered environmental psychology, you were intrigued, and here you are.

So, where is it exactly that you are? You may well have entered this big house through a variety of doors. Do you want to conduct fundamental research, that is to learn how humans interact with their physical environments (without any particular or immediate application to saving the planet or designing better buildings)? If so, welcome to the big house; this book has chapters for you. Do you want to understand how the physical environment impacts people in negative and positive ways? We have space in the big house for you, too. I know … you want to learn how and why people are damaging the only planet we have available to live on. Yes, of course, this big house has space for you, as well. All this book’s editor expects is that you respect and tolerate others in the house who have different goals.

Environmental psychology needs all of you, just as medicine needs fundamental biochemistry, knowledge about pathogens and paths to health, those whose practice focuses on the usual but important run of flu and fractures, and activist physicians who are willing to put their lives on the line by going to the front lines of the latest dangerous epidemic or war.

That is why the book has four protagonists, whom you will meet at the beginning of each chapter. I hope you will see a bit or a lot of yourself in one of these characters. They are all just now entering graduate school. Maria, Ethan, Gabriel, and Annabelle share a house and are friends who met through school or work. All four happen to be dedicated to environmental psychology, but they vary in their interests within the field and in their backgrounds.

Maria has a undergraduate degree in psychology, with a minor in neuroscience. She believes that knowledge advances best when strong and clear scientific methods are employed. She feels most comfortable in the laboratory, but she is willing to leave the lab to work on problems as long as the issue can be worked on with scientific methods. Privately, she is skeptical about the validity of field studies.

Ethan also has an undergraduate degree in psychology, but his minor was in sociology. He prefers to study environmental issues in the community, through surveys, interviews, and talking to community members. He believes that lab studies have their place, but ecological validity trumps the value of the confined laboratory. He is not so private about his belief that you can’t be sure of any finding that isn’t verified in the community. He belongs to three activist organizations.

Gabriel’s undergraduate degree was in geography. He spent a year in architecture school before realizing that he was more interested in the human dimensions of the built environment. Currently, he has a co-op position with the regional government; he is taking a term off from graduate school, but will return next term. Every day he hears from co-workers about how academics are OK, but they take far too long to conduct studies, and are unrealistic about policy, politics, and the application of research to the real world. Although he is a scientist at heart, he largely agrees with them. He is trying hard to bridge the science–policy gap.

Annabelle did her undergraduate degree in psychology, but she took as many courses about people with problems as she could; if she were not primarily interested in environmental psychology, she would be a clinical psychologist or social worker. Her minor was in environmental studies and she gets out into nature almost every weekend. Annabelle sees research more as a way to solve immediate problems for people. She is most comfortable with qualitative approaches, with research that has an immediate impact, and with research that sooner or later will help people overcome their personal difficulties.

As another way to connect the graduate student experience with this book, I invited some of my own advanced students to co-write the chapters with established, senior, well-published co-authors. The goal was to maximize the chances that each chapter reflected (a) the ways and means that people who are just entering environmental psychology understand it, and (b) the great experience that the senior authors possess. I hope that comes through as you read the chapters.

Which chapters? I thought you never would ask! OK, here is the preview. We cannot be a credible force in the world, even as activists, if we do not have a firm foundation in basic research. Without it we are simply … I was going to use a common phrase that involves “… the wind,” but let’s change that to “an ignored voice, devoid of authority.” So Chapter 2, by Reuven Sussman, describes what I call Step One: observing what actually occurs in an environmental context. We should “just watch” first, then try to figure out what is going on and how to change it. But “just watching” requires more special skills than one might think. So Reuven informally calls it “You Can Observe A Lot Just by Watching,” a cute title with an important theme. Whether you are studying how the built environment affects the behavior of its occupants or whether people recycle resources into the correct receptacles, a very important first step is to simply watch people, without trying to change or influence them. The design and execution of an intervention to change people or the environment can be greatly successful and useful (or not!), depending on observations about what people are actually doing now. Haste in conducting an intervention might, for example, involve much effort at changing a behavior that is already common (but you did not know that), or changing one that is so resistant to change that the planned intervention simply will not be effective. Just watching people will help to shape the nature of your study, and help to avoid you wasting much time and effort on a research design that is doomed to failure because you assumed what was going on in the setting but, sadly, you were wrong.

Chapter 3, by Cheuk Fan Ng, focuses on three special kinds of watching. Behavior mapping is about “adding up” the paths and activities of many people who use or visit a particular setting. Behavior tracking is doing the same for specific individuals in the setting, often those who have a special relationship with that setting. Observing physical traces is the “archeological” form of observation in environmental psychology. After many people have used a setting, they collectively leave traces: the wear on the floor, the impromptu signs put up, the path across the grass between buildings. This tells much about how the setting is being used.

Wokje Abrahamse, Linda Steg, and Wes Schultz contributed Chapter 4, all about the basics of moving beyond observation to actually conducting research in environmental psychology, with an emphasis on understanding human failings in our treatment of the environment. Some aspects and methods of research in environmental psychology are similar to those in other areas of psychology, but they focus on topics of interest in this big house. If you have taken a course called Research Methods in Psychology, these will be … let’s not say redundant; let’s say they will be refreshers. Who remembers everything about random assignment and statistics anyway? So Chapter 4 is like that. The basics, applied to environmental psychology.

Chapter 5, by Donald Hine, Christine Kormos, and Anthony Marks, reverts to the “often used in other fields” category. However, their topic, Survey and Interview Techniques, is highly customized for this big house, and includes some ideas and techniques that are not found or used in those other fields.

Chapter 6, by Amanda McIntyre and Taciano Milfont, is the book’s big-house take on the most commonly used method in all of psychology. However, no other area of psychology uses these measures, which have been developed over the lifetime of environmental psychology specifically to learn how people think about the physical environment. Need a tool for that? McIntyre and Milfont describe and discuss a whole toolbox of instruments for measuring each particular kind of attitude toward the environment … and if you think there is just one, you will be surprised. Selecting the most appropriate attitude measure for the hypothesis you wish to test is just as important as selecting the correct wrench for loosening a nut.

Not all methods use “objective” methods (actually, perhaps no method is fully objective anyway, but you know what I mean). In Chapter 7, David Seamon and Harneet Gill explain how to use qualitative approaches in environment-behavior research. The great value of this approach is that “the people speak, and in their own tongue.” What I mean by this is that in experiments, we researchers impose conditions on participants and then observe how they respond. Usually we don’t know what is going on in the “black box” of their minds, and that is a crucial part of learning about any person–environment interaction. Even if we conduct a survey or an interview, most of the time the person is restricted to answering the questions we ask; what if the important aspects of the person’s interaction with the environment is not among the questions we ask? We should often or even always try to “learn what is going on” before we rush into experiments and interventions. What are people in a particular environment of interest thinking and experiencing, in their own words, before we impose our own frames on that experience by asking questions of our own choice, or pressing them from our external positions without knowing how they experience their environments?

I vividly remember a study that Donald Hine and I conducted in which we asked participants to “think aloud” as they made decisions about allocating natural resources in a microworld (see below for a chapter on microworlds). We were quite surprised at some of the rationales we heard: in the whole history of experiments in that area, no researcher had thought to investigate these rationales, which were important to the people in our study who were making decisions. Without a qualitative approach, some of these rationales may never have come to light.

Chapter 8, by David Canter, explores the question: “how do different places fit together – or not – in people’s minds?” Which aspects of, say, restaurants or schools or cities, make them similar to or different from us? Canter explains several methods for assessing place constructs.

In Chapter 9, Daniel Montello will take you into the world of finding our way around environments. Cognition is a core psychological process, often studied in other areas of the discipline, but spatial cognition is a specialty of environmental psychology. Where would we be without it? Constantly lost, is where, which is why spatial cognition is so important. Because studying cognition itself is very difficult, Montello focuses on the observables: our behavior that reflects what we must be thinking as we navigate real and virtual spaces. Spatial cognition research spans our twin themes of principles and practice: just how it works (or not) is fascinating, but what we learn about it can have huge effects on the wayfinding success (or failure) of every person who tries to find any destination, in terms of helpful (or useless) signage or building design.

Chapter 10, by Angel Chen and Paul Bell, is about microworlds, that is, computer programs that simulate natural resources and the decisions that people make about using them. We know that people often (but not always) do a poor job of managing the bounty that Earth offers, but what is it that leads us to make more or less sustainable choices? One may choose to study a real-world commons (i.e., any shared limited, potentially renewable natural resource from which a number of harvesters may remove resources, such as a fishery or shared grazing land). However, as in any real-world context, identifying the causes of a person’s choices is difficult or even impossible because researchers usually are unable control the influences or factors that drive that person’s choices. Thus, causal relations cannot be known in field studies. To learn about the causes, for decades environmental psychologists have been creating simulated resource dilemmas called microworlds to do just that. Chen and Bell review the main methods and microworlds that can be used to supply answers to this crucial question.

How do we understand, perceive, or comprehend the built environment? If we could see them before they are built, might we avoid bad design or create more beautiful designs? Chapter 11, by Arthur Stamps, explicates the methods and challenges involved in simulating built environments. Again we have a topic (perception) that is traditional in psychology, but is unique in its emphasis on the built environment. Again we have a topic that spans principles and practice: Simulations may be employed to discover the fundamental science of human perceptual tendencies but also to inform the design of built environments that are actually to be (or already are) constructed or renovated.

This logically leads to the subject of Chapter 12, about planning the built environment through programming, contributed by Jay Farbstein, Richard Wener, and Lindsay McCunn. When any new building is contemplated, one might leave its design to the architect’s imagination, or one might work with the architect to design the building from its future users outward. That is, one might (environmental psychologists say should) begin with the needs and desires of those who will use the new building when it is being designed. Some may foolishly believe that these needs and desires are known or obvious; much experience of environmental psychologists says they are not. Programming is the systematic, user-centered method for creating building designs that will optimally serve those who will work, study, live, or visit it.

In turn, this leads to Chapter 13, by Richard Wener, Lindsay McCunn, and Jennifer Senick, on post-occupancy evaluation. After the building has been constructed, does it work for those who use it? Whether the “plan” was merely in a designer’s head (without any programming as in Chapter 12) or even if it was carefully planned with well-conducted programming, is the real structure, as built, working for those who use it? Programs may be thought of as a kind of hypothesis, and hypotheses should be tested. Wener, McCunn, and Senick describe the methods we use to test the hypothesis that the formal programming (or “based on my experience” guesses when programming was not done) worked to deliver what it promised, whether that is client satisfaction, or work efficiency, or optimal social relations, or anything else.

In Chapter 14, on action research, Valeria Cortés and Robert Sommer describe how to make a difference in the real world while conducting scientific research at the same time. Most environmental psychologists either conduct research to discover the principles of person–environment relations, or work to implement those principles in some real-world setting. Action research fuses the search for principles with their application to practice. For some, this is the dream or epitome of environmental psychology: doing both at the same time. Cortés and Sommer explain how to carry off this important two-for-one goal. Action research has its own special methods, ways to achieve both objectives without falling into a number of potential pitfalls.

Action researchers often focus on the built environment. In Chapters 15 and 16, we move to improving sustainability in one context or another. In Chapter 15, Wokje Abrahamse emphasizes the various strategies and research designs that can be used to create science-oriented change in real-world behavior. In Chapter 16, Scott Geller with Wokje Abrahamse, Reuven Sussman, and Branda Guan outline the specific approach to interventions called applied behavioral science (ABS). Although ABS and the approaches in Chapter 15 share the same goals, they offer a choice of philosophies about how to achieve those goals.

In Chapter 17, on ecotherapy, by Thomas Doherty and Angel Chen, the focus moves from improving the environment with human scientific efforts to improving people with environmental efforts. Nature is know to be a healing force (when it is not destroying people and places!). In the Hindu Shaivism tradition, the god Shiva is the creator, destroyer, and preserver – the very (spiritual) embodiment of what nature does for us and to us. Doherty and Chen document how nature can be harnessed, when it is being nice, to improve human functioning.

Not everyone has the same capabilities, and in Chapter 18, John Zeisel, Mark Martin, Lindsay McCunn, and I discuss some methods and concerns that are required in researching special populations. Disabilities come in many forms, each requiring somewhat different methods depending on which ability has been reduced, so we obviously cannot describe methods for every disability, but we thought as much as we could of the sorts of considerations that might be general as we wrote about designing for persons with Alzheimer’s (more of a cognitive problem) and multiple sclerosis (more of a physical problem).

Chapter 19, by Donald Hine, Victor Corral-Verdugo, Navjot Bhullar, and Martha Frias-Armenta, gets serious about numbers. Quantitative empirical science measures things. Measurement results in numbers. Numbers must be analyzed to decide whether those numbers are meaningful. Policymakers ignore numbers that are not meaningful (yes, policymakers also sometimes ignore meaningful numbers, but if the results are not statistically meaningful, they have very little chance of their meaning being moved toward policy). So, environmental psychology must include ways of deciding whether the numbers that emerge from our studies are meaningful. This book assumes that its readers already have some knowledge of statistics, including such basics as correlations, t-tests, analysis of variance, multiple regression, and perhaps factor analysis. Hine et al. describe the more interesting, useful, advanced, and newer forms of deciding whether the numbers are meaningful, that is, multi-level modeling and structural equation modeling. These words may well sound scary to anyone new to them, but the authors explain them in nice, clear prose, without too many formulae and subscripts, so that even the neophyte will come away from Chapter 19 at least well informed about what these modern techniques have to offer.

Finally, we must recognize that every individual study is limited in its sample population, the measures used, and the influences considered. Therefore no study “proves” any general principle. So, research is useless? Not at all. I like to compare the research we do to the work ants do, although that may sound unflattering (whether to researchers or to ants depends on one’s point of view). Each study, like each grain of sand laboriously carried to the anthill and carefully placed there, is a valuable contribution to a larger whole. How do we create our “anthill” in science? We must somehow combine the results of studies. We can either do that by “eye-balling” the published studies (i.e., subjectively decide what all the “grains of sand” amount to, and write a narrative about them), or by combining them in a scientific (and therefore more objective) way. In Chapter 20, Christine Kormos shows just how to do that through meta-analysis.

The starry galaxy of authors of these chapters and I sincerely hope that you find our explications of environmental psychology’s research methods useful.

Note

1

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: the name thing. Since the 1960s, several other names for the field have been proposed. Among these are

environment and behavior

,

ecopsychology

, and

conservation psychology

. In fact, the very first conferences that focused on these topics, in the mid-1960s, used the name

architectural psychology

. Quickly, however, those involved realized that the field included questions and answers that went beyond buildings to broader concerns with the environment itself, and

environmental psychology

was chosen as the most appropriate name. This name covers the whole field, from fundamental psychological processes such as perception and cognition of the built and natural environment to the use of everyday space by people, the design of physical settings of all kinds, understanding the impacts on people and by people on natural resources both living and not, and the climate-related behavior and attitudes. I suppose you can call it what you want to, but I believe that each of the other names represent pieces of the whole.

Environment and behavior

, by its very name, excludes such constructs as attitudes, values, and norms (although the journal of that name does publish studies involving these mental constructs).

Ecopsychology

focuses on clinical or therapeutic experiences.

Conservation psychology

, a name inspired by, and parallel to, conservation biology, originally focused on human–animal relations, although some have tried to broaden its scope to include the conservation of nature and natural resources, which was already being investigated by environmental psychologists. Perhaps it is natural that over time some researchers within a broader field specialize and prefer a narrower name for their work. I do not mean at all that the topics studied under these banners are not valuable, and so I have invited chapters on what would fit under these names in this book. However, environmental psychologists as a group unfortunately are so far a mere drop in the bucket of psychology as a whole. The membership of Division 34, the home of APA’s members with these interests, is less than one-third of one percent the size of APA’s total membership. This very clearly signals to me that we should use the inclusive name environmental psychology for all who are interested, regardless of our personal research interests, partly because it is the most accurate and inclusive umbrella terms of all these topics, and partly to avoid the field splintering into even smaller factions, which likely would be followed by oblivion. Only through having an inclusive, widely accepted “brand” will universities continue to fund professorships in this field, and professors are the essential institutional foundation for training future researchers like you, who, of course, represent the future of the field. Creating and promoting even smaller groups could lead to the disappearance of the field through the attrition of university professors and programs with the inclusive name.

2Observational Methods: The First Step in Science

Reuven Sussman

University of Victoria, BC, Canada

“Great show last night, Gabe!” exclaims Maria, referring to Gabriel’s band’s show the night before at Clinton’s. “Really, because I thought the show went much better last month at Sneeky Dees,” answers Gabriel. “Don’t you remember, everyone was dancing and singing along … And they even demanded two encores!”

The conversation reawakens a question in Gabriel’s mind that he had been secretly pondering for some time. Why were the shows at some bars more fun for the audience than others? Last month they played almost the same songs, to a similar audience, who drank (according to the bar tab) nearly the same amount of alcohol; and yet there was far more audience engagement at the first show than at the second. After two years of playing in just about every bar in the city, Gabriel thinks he might have an idea – the physical environment is playing a role in helping the audience engage with the band.

Gabriel decides to put his architectural research skills to use and, for the next few weeks, meticulously records detailed information about every show he attends (as an audience member). He notes all of the physical aspects of the space (such as lighting and the placement of tables and bar stools), as well as the number of people, the alcohol consumed, the weather outside and, of course, the amount of audience participation. Despite Maria’s incessant complaining (“this is useless, you can’t learn anything without controlling all the variables!”), he enlists her help, and after each show they compare notes to see how much they agree in their observations.

Eventually, a pattern seems to emerge – smaller bars with lower light levels and less seating appear to have more audience members closer to the stage, dancing and singing along.1Maria is impressed, but unconvinced. “This doesn’t prove anything, Gabe,” she points out, “there are too many possible explanations. Maybe the best bands play at certain bars, or maybe people go to those bars because they know that they’ll have a good time there.”

Gabriel knows Maria has a point. So he asks a friend of his who owns a local bar if he could systematically change certain aspects of the stage and dancing area to see if they have an effect on audience participation. His friend agrees, and over the next few weeks, Gabriel changes the lighting levels, size of the dance floor, and other aspects of the physical environment while several friends independently record observations of audience responses. With the same bands playing every week and similar audiences attending the shows, Gabriel and his team are able to empirically demonstrate that his theory is correct – the physical environment indeed plays a role in audience involvement!

Although Maria isn’t impressed at his methods, she can’t deny that she had witnessed a real change in behavior as a result of Gabriel’s suggestions to the bar owner. Gabriel now knows the secret to picking the best venues for his band and is able to earn a little extra cash as design consultant for bars and restaurants!

With such an emphasis today on survey methods in behavioral sciences, one might easily forget that observation is the true foundation of the scientific method. Indeed, “simple observation” was the tool by which Babylonians pioneered the earliest forms of astronomy. Later, the formation of empiricism in ancient Greece required a movement away from purely philosophical and (often) supernatural explanations of causes to more concrete approaches founded on observation and induction.

With the establishment of psychology and other behavioral sciences, observational research continued to play a role, but its importance has waxed and waned over the years. In the early years, psychologists were keen to demonstrate that their field was a true “science” and thus that it, like other scientific fields, relied heavily on physical, observable evidence. Later, psychology shifted its focus to Freudian principles and internal states, only to later shift back to behaviorism and observable actions. In recent years, however, with the rise of cognitivism and diminished interest in behavioral approaches, the field has once again moved to measures of internal states and self-reported behavior, as evidenced by the gradual shift from observation to self-reports in both of the major environment–behavior research journals: Journal of Environmental Psychology and Environment and Behavior (Giuliani & Scopelliti, 2009).

Perhaps the focus of behavioral research now relies too heavily on survey methods and theory testing without real behavioral observation. Many commonly held beliefs can often be overturned by simple observation; for example, Underhill and his colleagues (Underhill, 2000) learned that, contrary to popular belief, the best selling location for store items is not right by the entrance. Despite every customer passing this area, it is almost always ignored; customers do not actually begin shopping or looking for items until they are a minimum of several feet inside the door. This type of insight is easily and clearly established by waiting, watching, and recording.

The rest of this chapter will be devoted to: (1) defining observational research and when it is appropriate for use, (2) describing general approaches and specific methods for observation (along with their ethical considerations), and (3) discussing the intricacies of coding and inter-observer reliability.

What is Observational Research and Why do it?

In its simplest form, observation can be defined as receiving information through one of the five human senses. By this definition, however, nearly every study of behavior within an environment involves observation. Certainly, watching people explore a space or use a recycling bin is a form of observation, but so too would be viewing the results of cortisol tests or listening to answers from an interview. Given that topics such as interviewing, participant observation, and surveying will be covered elsewhere in this book (mainly Chapter 5), this chapter will focus solely on research methods pertaining to direct observation.

Indirect observation, another important tool for the study of environment–behavior relationships, involves methods such as personal diaries, informants, or trace measures. These will not be examined in depth here, only to say that they can be quite effective. For example, the Rochester Interaction Record (Wheeler & Nezlek, 1977), and related Social Behavior Inventory (Moskowitz, 1994), standardized event-contingent reporting methods (diary methods) are reliable and valid ways to learn about participants’ daily interactions from their own notes. In addition, trace measures (or a lack thereof) caused by erosion, leftovers, adaptations, repairs, or personalizations to a space (Zeisel, 1984) can also be “observed” for information about how the physical environment is used. For example, the wear on a door can be a good indication of where a handle should be situated (Chang & Drury, 2007). This type of indirect measure will also not be elaborated upon in this chapter given that it is particularly useful in the programming and post-occupancy evaluations of buildings (see Chapters 12 and 13), and is thus discussed at greater length in those chapters.

Direct observation, on the other hand, involves researchers learning about human–environment interactions using any or all of the five senses. To understand the effects of a restaurant on its diners, for instance, a researcher should smell the air, eat the food, feel the temperature in the room, listen to the background music, and watch how people respond to the whole experience. Certainly, our senses and abilities to record information could be enhanced with a variety of tools, but just watching (or listening, smelling, etc.) can provide a great deal of information as well. Arguably, although sense-enhancing technologies, such as microscopes, are vital for advancing science, the naked eye provides information in human-sized units that are at least equally important for the understanding of human–environment interaction as are other “enhanced” measures. Many ground-breaking studies make use of audio or video recordings and these methods will be discussed later in this chapter.

Finally, observational research methods can (and are) used for the study of both humans and the physical environment. Despite a focus on direct observation of human behavior