participant

• advantages

  • theoretical - produces rich, qualitative data, by observing day to day life of group in natural environment. best way to understand something is to experience it ourselves = higher validity - but Hawthorne effect 
• advantages 

  • practical - subject matter - could be only viable method for studying certain groups (eg criminals) since they could be more suspicious of outsiders. eg Yablonksy - teen gangs see researchers as unwelcomed representatives of authority, may not engage - can construct a rapport - but could get researcher involved in crime (needs to report = harder to get data)
• disadvantages

  • practical - time consuming eg Whyte’s study took him 4 years to complete, makes method less preferred to others, expensive - researcher needs experience to recognise sociologically significant areas of intrigue
• disadvantages 

  • theoretical - low representativeness - usually a small sample selected haphazardly (eg chance encounter) = less generalisable data eg Downes + Rock - ‘internally valid’ insightful data may not be ‘externally valid’