Quasi

• Quasi exp is where the IV can’t be manipulated and randomly allocated to groups because it’s a personal characteristic of the pp's
• e.g. of personal characteristics that can't be manipulated

  gender, age, personality, intelligence (IQ)
• STRENGTHS

  • only way to study the effect of an IV that is a fixed personal characteristic of pp's so enable research into personal characteristics on behaviour which can't be done in a lab or field experiment
• LIMITATIONS

  • contains pp variables which can't be controlled so become confounding variable whereas lab or field studies can control them using random allocation e.g. picking names from hat
  • has low internal validity and hard to establish cause and effect between IV and DV
• study of whether people with depression find it difficult to sleep. pp's who have been diagnosed with depression and participants who don’t have depression. asks them questions about the quality of their sleep.What kind of experiment is this and why?


  Quasi experiment because can’t manipulate the IV of depression.
• A con of using quasi experiments is that the participants can’t be randomly allocated to groups which means that uncontrolled participant variables might act as confounding variables in the study. This would reduce the internal validity of the study and make it harder to establish a cause and effect.