Lab

• When conducting a lab experiment, you would use 2 groups of participants, treat them differently and compare the results.

  The experimental group- The group which is treated differently, looking for a cause and effect relationship.

  The control group- The group which is not treated differently, it is used to measure against the experimental group, looking for change
• Reliability of lab experiments:

  • Highly reliable as they can be repeated in exact detail, producing comparable results each time. This makes it useful for looking at cause and effect relationships. Therefore, it is preferred by positivist sociologists
  • However, it is difficult to control some of the variables at play when investigating society.
• Practical problems of lab experiments:

  • Can't be used to study the past
  • Only uses small scale samples which makes is difficult to study large scale patterns, reducing their representativeness and generalisibility.
  • It is difficult to control the variables at play when investigating society
• Ethical issues of lab experiments:

  • Lack of informed consent
  • Deception (Milgram study)
  • Harm (Zimbardo- prison experiment)
• What was Zimbardo's prison experiment?

  24 male college students were selected and randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a simulated prison environment. Zimbardo found that the guards began to exhibit authoritarian behaviours, while the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and helplessness. The experiment had to be terminated after 6 days due to the severe emotional stress experienced by participants.
• What is the Hawthorne effect?

  Mayo researched factory workers' productivity in the Hawthorne plant. However, he discovered that no matter how he changed the variables in his experiment, the productivity continues to increase. The workers behaviour had not changed trough manipulation of the variables, but only because they are being studied.
• Lab experiments cause the Hawthorne effect as the lab is not a natural environment. If people know they're being studies, their behaviour will change.
• Interpretivists argue that people have free will and therefore can't be accurately studied through experiments which identify cause and effect relationships.

  This is because we are not simply controlled by social stimulus