Participant Observation to Research Education

Last Updated on October 16, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Participant observation is favoured by interpretivists because it produces rich, qualitative data and allows an in-depth exploration of the thoughts and feelings of the people involved.

If done rigorously, it is the best method for gaining an empathetic understanding of respondents, where we really see the world through their eyes. This post looks at the practical, theoretical and ethical issues of using participant observation to research education, followed by a summary and evaluation of one classic study, Mairtin Mac an Ghaill’s Young, Gifted and Black (1988).

It’s written for the Methods in Context part of the A-level course. For how to answer that question, see How to Answer Methods in Context Questions.

Practical issues

One of the main ways of collecting data in participant observation is simply “hanging out” with respondents, and it’s difficult to see how an adult researcher could “hang out” with either pupils or teachers today.

Both are too busy during the formal school day. With pupils especially, there is little chance an adult researcher would be allowed to just hang around with them, for child protection reasons, even if pupils wanted to “hang out” with an adult for a day, a week, a term or longer, which is unlikely for most of them.

There is little chance schools or parents would give an adult researcher access to their children in this way. It would also be impossible to do covertly, because if you were posing as a teacher or a learning support assistant, you wouldn’t naturally “hang out” with pupils.

In the 1980s, Mac an Ghaill did carry out overt participant observation with his own students while he was employed as a teacher, focusing on how they dealt with racism, and he did “hang out” with them informally (see below). Today, this would be frowned upon.

If you’re researching teachers, you’re more likely to gain access to do overt participant observation, but you might be something of an irritation, and teachers might be on their guard about what they say “backstage” if they knew a researcher was present.

A researcher could do covert participant observation in a school by secretly training as a teacher or a learning support assistant, but in the case of teaching, the training alone takes a year.

Observation in a school is also limited by the school day and the school year: you don’t get to do research in the holidays, and you probably wouldn’t find out anything about the home lives of either pupils or teachers using this method.

Finally, if you’re doing covert research, there is the problem of recording data. If you’re employed, you have to do the job, so any recording and writing up would have to be done at the end of the working day.

Theoretical issues

Schools are complex places. They contain large numbers of pupils in intersecting friendship groups; pupils attend several classes a day, probably with several different teachers; and there are further interactions at break and lunchtime. If researchers wanted a full understanding of peer-group interaction today, they would probably need to investigate social media too, which goes on before, during and after the school day. This sheer complexity makes participant observation a good fit, because it stands the best chance of uncovering the depth and reality of school life.

HOWEVER, it’s unlikely that pupils would want to reveal their feelings to an adult “hanging out” with them. In real life, adults generally don’t hang out with children (other than their own family), so this would hardly be a naturalistic setting where respondents would be at ease.

If you were doing participant observation with teachers, they would be more likely to relax and act naturally over time, but they might impression-manage if they knew a researcher was present doing overt rather than covert research.

Ultimately, the validity of the data depends on the skills and personal characteristics of the researcher, and because these will probably affect the data collected, reliability will probably be low.

In terms of representativeness, this method can only be done in one school at a time, with a handful of pupils or teachers, so you couldn’t claim your data represented pupils nationally. If you wanted representative data, you would need follow-up studies using more quantitative methods.

Ethical issues

Child protection could be a real problem with this method: the more invasive the method, the more chance there is of harm to respondents.

If you’re researching deviance, there is also the question of what to do if you find out pupils are doing things they shouldn’t be, such as underage drinking. You would be morally obliged to report it, but that would breach confidentiality.

Young, Gifted and Black (Mac an Ghaill, 1988)

A brief summary of Young, Gifted and Black: Student-Teacher Relations in the Schooling of Black Youth (1988) by Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, and an evaluation of the practical, ethical and theoretical strengths and limitations of participant observation in this educational context.

In Young, Gifted and Black, Mac an Ghaill carried out two ethnographic studies in inner-city educational institutions where he worked as a teacher. The first looked at the relations between white teachers and two groups of male students with anti-school values: the Asian Warriors and the African Caribbean Rasta Heads. The second looked at a group of Black female students, of African Caribbean and Asian parentage, called the Black Sisters.

Why study this subject?

Because of opportunity. He originally wanted to study Irish students, but couldn’t get help to do this, so he was advised to study African Caribbean students instead. As for the Black Sisters, he never intended to study them: they found him. Because he was seen as being on the students’ side, they were happy to talk to him about their views on racism.

Because Mac an Ghaill wanted a close insight into his respondents’ culture and values, he chose participatory methods. He became friendly with the students, and they visited his home regularly. He describes how talking, eating, dancing and listening to music together helped break down the barriers that his role as a teacher, and their status as students, might otherwise have created.

At the time, the dominant theories argued that Black underachievement was caused by subcultures of resistance: the problem was seen as lying with the students themselves.

HOWEVER, following his in-depth research, and his adoption of what he called a “Black perspective”, he concluded that racism, rather than the students themselves, was the biggest problem in their schooling. Their subcultures were a response to a racially structured institution.

Ethical issues

Mac an Ghaill does not claim to be value-free: he was committed to helping students overcome the racial barriers they perceived.

The research also brought him into conflict with some other members of staff, as he found himself defending ethnic minority students against what he saw as a racist institution.

Practical issues

Mac an Ghaill was only able to do this research because of his position as a teacher. It would have been practically impossible otherwise.

Theoretical issues

Reliability and representativeness are both low: the study was carried out by one researcher, with small groups of students, in two institutions.

Validity is an interesting one. Given the in-depth, participatory nature of the method, we might assume we are getting a true insight into the thoughts and feelings of the respondents. HOWEVER, the research only gives us an insight into the students’ perceptions of racism, not whether the institution actually was racist. Even so, understanding that the students perceived it as racist gives us real insight into why they formed subcultures.

Finally, because Mac an Ghaill was both researcher and teacher, some students may not have opened up to him fully.

Using participant observation in the exam

Participant observation in schools can come up in the 20-mark Methods in Context question, either as overt or covert participant observation. Mac an Ghaill is your best example of the overt version, and of the access a teacher-researcher can get that an outsider can’t. Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977) is the other classic school ethnography: see Learning to Labour.

For worked exam answers using participant observation, see:

• Participant observation to investigate pupil exclusions (June 2018)
• Covert participant observation to investigate pupils with behavioural difficulties (AS specimen)

For the research contexts, see Researching Pupils, Researching Teachers and Researching in Classrooms.

Signposting

This post has been written for students studying the Methods in Context part of the research methods topic, as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course. For participant observation as a method, see Overt Participant Observation and Covert Participant Observation. For other methods applied to education, see Using Interviews to Research Education and Experiments and Education.

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