experiments Flashcards
What does the experimental group do?
Manipulates the independent variable to establish any effect on the dependent variable
What is the independent variable?
The factor that the researchers changes or controls to test its effect on the dependent variable
What is the dependent variable?
the variable being tested and measured
What is the control group?
no manipulation of the independent variable
Why do scientists manipulate variables?
To see what effect they have enables the scientists to establish a cause and effect relationship
Are laboratory experiments reliable?
- an experiment can be replicated so easily so experiments are highly reliable
1. researchers can repeat the original experiment step by step
2. its a detached method as scientists personal feelings have no effect upon the control of the experiment - But lab experiments are rarely used by sociologists, even positivists
What are the practical problems with experiments?
- society is very complex with multiple variables
- A lab experiment cannot study the past
- experiments usually use small scale samples and so have limited representativeness
What are the ethical problems with experiments?
- Deception= it is wrong to mislead people about the nature of the experiment
- lack of informed consent= children might be unable to understand the nature and purpose of the experiment
- Harm= stress of experiment
What is the Hawthorne effect?
- if people know they are being studies they may change their behaviour and not behave true to life
- produces invalid data
What is free will in a experiment?
- interpretivists, humans are fundamentally different to most phenomena studies by scientists
- humans have free will and thus we can only be understood in terms of the choices we freely make, not cause and effect
- so sociologists use field experiments and the comparative method
What are field experiments?
- favoured by interpretivists
- take place in subjects own natural surroundings not in an artificial laboratory experiment
-those involved are usually unaware that they are in an experiment so no Hawthorne effect - data is more valid, natural and realistic
- positivists argue that field experiments give us less control over other variables
- unethical, subjects have not given their consent e.g. Rosenhan on schizophrenia
What is the comparative method?
- thought experiment
- carried out in the mind of the sociologists not on real people
- also to discover the cause and effect relationships
STEP 1: identify two groups of people that are all alike except for the one variable in which the sociologists is interested
STEP 2: compare the two groups to see if this one difference between them has any effect - avoids artificiality can be used to study past events
- no ethical problems
- but even less control over variables than field experiments, so less certain that the cause can really be established
What is Durkheims study of suicide?
- his hypothesis was that low levels of integration of individuals into social groups caused high rates of suicide
- he argued that Catholicism produced higher levels of integration than Protestantism
- from this he therefore predicted Protestants would have a higher suicide rate than Catholics
- he compared suicide rates of Catholics and protestants. His prediction was supported by the official statistics which showed Catholics to have lower suicide rates
3 advantages of the comparative method?
- it avoids artificiality
- it can be used to study past events
- it poses no ethical problems such as harming subjects
disadvantages of the comparative method?
- gives researchers even less control over variables than do field experiments, so we can be less certain whether a thought experiment really has discovered the cause of something
