2 Mark Strengths and Weaknesses Flashcards
Strength of a Lab Experiment
There is high control of extraneous variables which means we can be fairly sure that the change in the DV is due to the IV showing us a casual relationship.
Weakness of a Lab experiment
The high levels of control and environment means that the experiment is conducted in a highly artificial setting. This may mean that participants may behave differently to how they would in real life, meaning ecological validity is low.
Strength of Field Experiment
Participants will be in their natural environment meaning they are more likely to how they usually would in real life. This means that results have high ecological validity and therefore can be generalised.
Weakness of a Field Experiment
There is no control over some extraneous variables meaning that there is a lack of internal validity as we can be unsure that the change in the DV is due to the IV.
Strength of Natural Experiment
This allows us to investigate things where it would be unethical or impractical to actually manipulate the IV ourselves, for example it would be unethical to kill someones parents to gain research.
Weakness of a Natural experiment
Because the IV is not directly manipulated it is difficult to actually demonstrate a causal link between the two and extraneous variables may also come into play making this even harder.
Strength of a Correlation Study
This can allows a researcher to investigate naturally occurring variables and their relationship that may be unethical or impractical to test experimentally like testing the correlation between lung cancer and smoking.
Weakness of a Correlation Study
Correlation does not equal causation. Just because we can see there is a correlation does not mean that the variables actually cause each other, they may not actually be related in any way. For example dentures correlate with death but it doesn’t mean they cause people to die.
Strength of a Naturalistic Observation
This gives us a picture of how people behave in their natural settings and therefore produces high ecological validity. For example it is better to observe littering behaviour than give out questionnaires as people lie.
Weakness of a Naturalistic Observation
There is little control of extraneous variables so the observer cannot be completely sure about what is causing the behaviour therefore making it more difficult to conclude anything from research.
Strength of Controlled Observation
There is control over extraneous variables meaning it is much easier to see a cause for the behaviour and therefore easier to make a conclusion from data obtained.
Weakness of Controlled Observation
High levels of control can make the situation too artificial meaning that participants do not behave as they usually would causing the ecological validity to be low.
Advantage of Self-Reported Data
The participant is giving their own feelings and thoughts therefore sometimes it can be much more truthful and avoids things like investigator bias.
Weakness of Self-Reported Data
Participants are not always truthful in how they feel and can sometimes downplay or emphasise their feelings to try and match what they feel people want to hear. Social desirability bias.
Strength of Questionnaires
We can collect large amounts of data in a small amount of data as they are easy to distribute and gain back. Especially if you giving people an incentive to answer
Weakness of Questionnaires
Questionnaires are limited to certain types of people, these are people who are most likely to answer questions as they enjoy it or have the time to do it. So you are not gaining a representative sample of the whole population.
Strength of Interviews
You can capture both verbal and non-verbal reactions making it much easier to see how the participant really feels about something.
Weakness of Interviews
Reliability can be very low depending on how the interviewer reacts for each participant or question as this could influence how the participant reacts to the questions asked.
Strength of Content Analysis
There is high ecological validity as it is based on what people actually do, they are not aware their work is being studied and they have already completed it anyway so we completely avoid things like demand characteristics.
Weakness of Content Analysis
It is easy to get problems of observer bias as it is very easy for people to interpret things in the wrong way this reduces reliability of results but can be resolved using inter-rater reliability.
Strength of Case Studies
This allows us to find out information about certain phenomena that we could not usually ethically repeat and develops our understanding of psychology for example we could not ethically repeat the case of HM, but he massively developed our understanding of the hippocampus and memory.
Weakness of Case Study
It is ungeneralisable to the whole population as it is a study of one individual or group which means we have no idea if everyone else would act the same without repeating the study many times.
