The aim of the study was to test the hypothesis that psychiatrists cannot reliably tell the difference between people who are sane and those who are insane.

The sample consisted of eight sane people, a psychology graduate student in his 20s, three psychologists, a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter, and a 'housewife' attempting to gain admission to 12 different hospitals, in five different states in the USA. There were three women and five men. A disadvantage of using this sample is that it cannot be generalised, for the reason that there was only 2 women and five men thus not being wholly reliable to generalise results but also that this study was conducted in the United states therefore results may differ to the rest of the world.

Quantitative data is data that can be expressed numerically in some way. Quantitative data was obtained from the study by Rosenhan such as the amount of times the hospital staff came on to the ward, The records the pseudo patients had made about the amount of time the nurses stayed in the ward offices was about 90 per cent of the time and the number of times medical staff came onto the ward, and the amount of time spent with psychiatrists, psychologists, registrars and so forth was, on average, under seven minutes per day.. Additionally, the amount of medication given to each patient was another quantitative measure it was estimated that the pseudo patients were given a total of 2,100 medication tablets, though only two were swallowed.

Join now!

A weakness for quantitative data is that it does not go into detail therefore the results are brief and sometimes cannot be wholly reliable, because crucial information may be missed. For example the amount of medication given to the participants, the researchers do not know why this amount of medication was given to each patient therefore the results found may miss out vital information, this could then mean that due to the results not being detailed enough you cannot generalise results. Strength of using quantitative data is that it is easy to analyse, for example the amount of medication given ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Here's what a teacher thought of this essay

Avatar

A fascinating and important topic. The essay goes some way towards identifying some of the key issues with some irrelevant or undeveloped points. 3*