Conducting observations in natural settings—including within classrooms, schools, and educational organisations—is a common and fruitful approach in sociological and comparative education research. Indeed, insights gained from observations in situ often highlight how actions and social relations manifest in and across various contexts, including within a singular community or across multiple classrooms and countries. Approaches to conducting observations vary widely depending on their purpose, however. Highly structured observations typically apply standardised observation systems to capture and compare specific behaviours across many contexts, such as international studies of teaching quality (Bell et al., 2019). These studies generally seek to correlate observations and produce generalisations about large data sets, sometimes combined with student/teacher characteristics or achievement data (e.g., OECD, 2020). Ethnographic studies otherwise tend to prioritise prolonged engagement within a narrower field, where researchers may act as participant-observers and make in-depth fieldnote observations. A key purpose of these studies is to better understand the logics and experiences of individuals involved in the (arguably deeply sociocultural) processes of teaching and learning (e.g., Anderson-Levitt, 2004; Maseman, 1982). There are of course many other approaches to observation, too, some of which combine aspects of these two and draw on a similarly diverse set of epistemological and theoretical paradigms. Despite these stark differences, what all approaches to observational research have in common is some reckoning with the notion of context. In this paper, then, we draw on examples from a range of empirical studies conducted in and beyond Europe to explore three ways context may be interpreted, employed, or ignored in sociological and comparative studies utilising observation. First, context is sometimes perceived eco-systemically as occurring across macro (cultural, economic, social), meso (school, community), and/or micros levels (classroom, students) (see also Bray & Thomas, 1995). The extent to which studies engage with and across these ‘levels’ varies widely, however; some merely acknowledge their existence in passing. Second, context may refer to the specific purposes for conducting observations, sometimes beyond research projects. Structured classroom observation protocols, for example, are increasingly utilised for teacher evaluation or feedback (Liu et al., 2019). Third, context may relate to the conceptual lenses we use to understand and analyse observational data (Martinez et al., 2016), and the positionalities and standpoints of the researchers themselves. In discussing these three interpretations of context, then, we highlight in this conceptual paper how attending to ‘context’ permeates all aspects of observational studies, whether acknowledged or otherwise.

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