Natural experiments

• Natural experiments

  • No control of IV
  • Conducted in a natural real life environment
  • IV occurs naturally and is out of the control of the researcher
• A strength of natural experiments is that they take place in a natural environment so the findings can be applied to everyday life as the participants are in familiar surroundings and may show natural behaviour which is reflective of everyday life. Thus increasing the ecological validity
• A weakness of natural experiments is that there is a lack of control which means you cannot control all the variables that occurred in the experiment and cannot make them occur in the exact same way when repeating the experiment. This means that we cannot establish a standardised procedure and cannot repeat the experiment to see if the findings are consistent. Thus decreasing the reliability
• A weakness of natural experiments is that the lack of control over variables also means that EVs may influence the participants behaviour. As a result, we cannot be sure the cause and effect relationship between the IV and DV is only the IV affecting the DV. Furthermore, random allocation cannot take place as we have no control over which condition participants are placed in. Thus decreasing the validity