field experiment

• field experiment

  • takes place in the subject's natural surroundings (rather than artificial laboratory environment)
  • those involved do not know they are subjects (avoid hawthorne effect)
  • researcher isolates and manipulates one or more variables in the situation to see what effect it has on subjects
• example of field experiment

  • Rosenthal and Jacobson manipulated teachers expectations about pupils by giving them misleading information about the students abilites in order to discover effects on educational achievement
• actor and correspondence tests

  • type of field experiment e.g. wood et al sent closely matched job applications from 3 different ethnicties
  • studies show value of field experiments-more natural and valid for real life, avoid artificiality
• field experiment (positives)

  • natural and valid
  • avoid the artificiality of laboratory experiments
• field experiment (negatives)

  • more natural and real situation, the less control we have over the variables
  • unethical, since subjects cannot give consent
• comparitive method

  • re-anaylysing secondary data that has already been collected
  • designed to discover cause and effect relationships
  • most famous example: Durkheim's study of suicide
  • 3 advantages over laboratory experiments: it avoids artificiality, used to study past events, aviods the ethical problems of harming and deceiving subjects