limitations

• 1. Practical – Unrealistic

  • To carry out a laboratory experiment, a controlled environment is required. This may be easy for the natural scientist, but can there really be such a thing as a ‘sociological laboratory’?
  • Additionally, individuals are very complex! It is impossible to ‘match’ the members of the control and experimental groups exactly – no two human beings are exactly alike
• Practical – Time constraints

  • Experiments can only be carried out over a short period of time.
  • Additionally, they cannot be used to study an event in the past, since we cannot control variables that were acting in the past rather than the present.
• 1. Ethical – Harm to subjects

  Research should not harm participants, psychologically or physically. However, even when a participant is aware of the purpose of the experiment, their experiences may still cause harm. In the case of Milgram’s experiment, participants were clearly distressed at the idea that they were causing harm to another person even though the ‘researcher’ was telling them to do so. One way researchers overcome this is by debriefing the participants once it has been completed.
• Theoretical – Lack of validity

  The laboratory is an artificial situation – what takes place may have little relevance to the ‘real world’ – an unnatural setting leads to unnatural behaviour, compromising the VALIDITY of any data, especially if participants are aware of being observed. This may encourage the Hawthorne effect.