There may also be some effects to being watched. People will react differently when being watch, for example, a parent will treat a child differently when being watched; they may be kinder to the child and pay more attention to the child.
Field experiments
Field experiments are experiments that are not conducted in laboratories, but are carried out in natural setting such as in the street, at school, or at work.
Advantages of the field experiment
An advantage of the field experiments over the laboratory method is that the behaviour of the participants is often more typical and so there is more accurate results from it, as the experiment is less artificial. This method has all the advantages of the experimental method as the variables are usually kept the same and results can be obtained easily.
Disadvantages of the field experiment
One of the disadvantages of this method is that the variables cannot be kept constant as easily, as if the weather stays the same then that is lucky, but if the weather changed, then it is much harder to change it the way we would like it.
Another disadvantage of the field experiment is that you cannot get a large amount of results as fast as you would as if you did it using the experimental method.
Quasi Experiments
These types of experiments conducted by investigating things that has happened over natural cause. We use quasi experiments when we are unable to use experimental methods because of ethical issues. For example, if we wanted to compare children with divorced mothers with children with parents, who weren’t divorced, then we can’t tell parents to get divorced just for the sake of an experiment. For this experiment we would use a quasi experiment, we would compare children with parents who are already divorced, with children whose parents haven’t been divorced.
Advantaged of the quasi experiment
An advantage of this type of experiment is that it is more natural and we can investigate real life situations easily. Another advantage is that the independent variable is already controlled, and the independent variable is working, all the experimenter has to do is to observe the independent variable.
Disadvantages of the quasi experiment
A disadvantage of the quasi experimental method is that the variables cannot be controlled, and we have to find the people who fit exactly to the specifications of the experimenter’s variables. Another disadvantage is that they have to get the participants permission to take part in the investigation, and people who have just had a member of the family die for example, are unlikely to agree.
Natural Experiments
A natural experiment is kind of a quasi experiment. It is a study of people in various naturally occurring conditions such as a volcano eruption. An example of a natural experiment would be to compare stress with a volcano eruption, or the effect TV has on the aggressiveness of young children in poor countries.
Advantages of natural experiments
An advantage of this type of experiment is that the participants are often not aware that they are taking part in an experiment, which means that they will behave more naturally.
Another advantage of this type of experiment is that there are fewer ethical issues with it because the experimenter is not responsible for the fact that the participants have been exposed to the independent variable.
Disadvantages of the natural experiment
The participants are not chosen randomly and this could affect the results, e.g. observing children in one group with no TV and another group with TV, one of the groups could be just an aggressive community, or there may be other reasons for the aggressiveness.
One of the limitations of this type of experiment is that it is hard to know what aspects of the independent variable have caused any effects on behaviour, for example, when observing stress of people that are next to a volcano that is about to erupt, there may be other sources of stress as well, such as social factors.
Correlation analysis
Another way of experimenting behaviour is to look for links or correlations between to things such as (1) the amount of violent television watched, and (2) how violent the person is in certain situations. There should be a positive correlation which means that the more violent TV watched, the more aggressive the person is.
Advantages of the correlation analysis
With correlation studies it is easy to see any associations between to variables without telling asking for volunteers. For example, you could just send out a questionnaire asking people how many cigarettes they smoke, and whether they have a illness and what it is. Then you can draw a graph and see if there is a correlation, this would be fast and easy and you can obtain lots of information and look at it all at the same time easily and make a good accurate hypothesis from it.
Disadvantages of the correlation analysis
There may be three variables that a correlation experiment will not show. Such as the experiment on children who watch TV and there aggressiveness, there may be family issues that could also be the cause.
The general public might get the wrong idea with the correlation evidence.
Naturalistic observations
This type of experiment is done without the experimenter interfering in any way, for example, observing animal behaviour in there natural environment rather than in a laboratory.
Advantages of the natural observations
The participants are unaware that they are being observed and so behave naturally.
Another advantage is that it provides richer and fuller information they typical laboratory experiments e.g. a range of different social context rather than on their own in the laboratory.
Disadvantages of the naturalistic observation
The experimenter has not control over the situation which can make it very hard to decide what caused the participants to behave the way they did.
There can be problems with the reliability with the observational measures taken because the categories into which behaviour is coded are imprecise.
Interview and questionnaire surveys
There are six types of interview:
- Non-directive interviews – has no structure, the person interviewed can talk freely, all the interviewer does is to guide the conversation along
- Informal interviews – this type on interview is the same as the non-directive interview except the interviewer is concerned with one particular thing and urges the interviewee to go into more detail into that topic.
- Guided interview – this is a more structured interview and the interviewer identifies the issues to be addressed.
- Clinical interviews – this type of interview is often uses to assess patients with mental disorders, the interviewer will ask the same questions, but some follow-up questions that depend on the answers to the other questions.
- Fully structures interviews – questions are asked, but the interviewee can only choose and answer from the answers given.
- Questionnaire surveys – the respondents are asked to record their own answers with pen and paper.
