Participant observation is a way of getting information about a group of people. A person doing participant observation will live with a group of people in their normal environment. They do this so they can learn about that groups way of life. One of the uses of participant observation is to understand the world from the point of view of a person from that group. This is done by watching the things they do every day. The product of participant observation is normally a piece of writing about what the researcher has seen. It is called ethnography. Participant observers can live with the group for months or many years. The longer the researcher is with the group, the better the information they learn will be.