Field experiments

• Rosenthal and Jacobson:


  manipulated teachers' expectations about pupils by giving them misleading information about the pupils' abilities in order to discover what effects that had on the children's achievements.
• Actor tests and correspondence tests:

  Brown and Gay: sent a white actor and a black actors for interviews for the same posts, to see which one would be offered the job.
• Actors tests and correspondence tests:

  Wood et al: sent closely matched job applications for almost 1,000 vacancies, apparently from 3 applicants of different ethnicity
• The comparative method:


  Durkheim: classic study of suicide, which relied on analysing official statistics.