Foundations of the Behavioralist Approach to Comparative Participant Observation

The specter of positivism looms large in both the discussion and the practice of sociological research. Ethnographic traditions such as grounded theory and the extended case method have long emphasized how their approaches provide a critical alternative to the typically quantitative approaches grounded in the conventional scientific tradition (CST) descendent from positivism. In contrast, this chapter takes a different approach by showing how and why an approach to participant observation drawing on behavioralist principles serves a necessary and irreducible role in the realist variable-based approach that has succeeded positivism as the standard for mainline social science. However, addressing CST concerns about validity, generalization, and replication involves more than a symbolic gesture toward these issues or critiques of other methods. Participant observers must employ a rigorous approach to multisite sampling, leverage comparison, and employ reproducible observational techniques to systematically analyze continuity and variation in human behavior. While acknowledging that this can be difficult in the current intellectual environment, this chapter argues that the payoff is substantial—when done well this form of ethnography provides unparalleled resources for observing causal mechanisms in situ, producing robust models that link micro-, meso-, and macro-level social processes, and reducing inferential error in explanations of behavioral patterns.