Question: Do people know that you are watching them - if so would that change the results

Jack Joyce answered on 11 Nov 2019:

That’s a fantastic question. In Social Psychology we have the ‘dead social scientist test’ (pardon the name!) which means that, if I as a researcher had never been born, would this interaction still happen? and if the answer is ‘yes’ then it passes that test.

So I try to pass that test whenever I can — as you point out, the recording can influence how people behave BUT (and a huge BUT!) people will forget they’re being recorded and go about their lives without acting as though they’re being recorded AND, if they do talk about being recorded then that’s something we can analyse too!

We try to collect data that is as natural as possible (without researcher influence), but some times that’s not possible, so when we make our arguments we have to clearly justify why we’ve collected data in those ways.