EXPERIMENTS Flashcards
1
Q
Mayo (The Hawthorne Effect, Laboratory Experiments)-
A
- A laboratory isn’t a normal environment which may lead to artificial behaviour in these conditions, which can cause invalid results to be produced. If people know they’re being studied, they may behave different, by, for example, trying to second-guess what the researcher wants them to do and acting accordingly, ruining the experiment.
- Mayo, in 1927, began researching into factors affecting workers’ productivity at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Plant. He worked with five female volunteers who knew they were being observed.
- He altered different variables such as lighting, heating, rest breaks etc, in order to see how they affected volunteers’ output.
- Productivity both rose with better, and worser, conditions, causing him to conclude that the way in which participants were responding was due to the fact they wanted to please the experimenter.
2
Q
Eval (Reliability)-
A
- However, the effect may be spotted as due to experiments reliability, it can be repeated and differences in results can be analysed.
- Scientists can repeat these experiments in every detail as the original experimenter can specify precisely what steps were followed in the original experiment.
3
Q
Milgram (Ethical Problems, Laboratory Experiments)
A
- There are ethical objections to conducting experiments on humans, which include lack of informed consent (researcher needs consent, which can be hard to get especially from children or people with learning disabilities), and deception (misleading people). For example, Milgram’s 1974 study of obedience to authority involved him lying to his research participants, telling them that they were ordered by the researcher to administer electric shocks when the learner failed to answer questions correctly. In reality, he wanted to test a person’s willingness to obey orders to inflict pain. No electric shocks were actually used but he did find that 65% of people were prepared to administer shocks of 450 volts. The problem is this experiment may cause harm to participants, as it caused them to “sweat, stutter, tremble… uncontrollable seizures were observed for three subjects”.
4
Q
Eval (Supporters of Milgram)-
A
- Argued that his experiments can be justified ethically because they alert us to the dangers of blindly obeying authority figures. Also, 74% of his participants said afterwards they had learned something of great value.
5
Q
Rosenhan (Field Experiments)-
A
- Our behaviour often cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect due to us having free will, and so other methods are used.
- Field experiments take place in the subjects natural surroundings, and those involved are often not aware that they are subjects of said experiment, eliminating the Hawthorne effect.
- The researcher manipulates one or more of the variables in the situation to see what effects it’ll have on the subjects of the experiment.
- For example, in Rosenhan’s 1973 ‘pseudopatient’ experiment, researchers presented themselves at 12 Californian mental hospitals, claiming that they were hearing voices and got diagnosed with schizophrenia.
- Once in hospital, they acted normally, but were still treated as mentally ill, which suggested that it wasn’t the patients behaviour which led them to be treated as sick, but the label. This shows how field experiments are more ‘natural’.
6
Q
Eval (Theoretical, Ethical)-
A
- May be less valid as the more realistic we make the situation, the less control we have over operating variables.
- Also, field experiments may be more unethical as they involve carrying out an experiment on subjects without their knowledge or consent.
7
Q
Durkheim (The Comparative Method, Suicide)-
A
- Carried out in the mind of the sociologist, a ‘thought experiment’.
- It works by identifying two groups of people that are alike in all respects apart from the one variable of interest.
- The two groups are then compared to see if this one difference has any effect.
- This was seen in 1896 when Durkheim presented the hypothesis that low levels of integration caused higher levels of suicide.
- He argued that Catholicism produced higher levels of integration than Protestantism, so predicting Protestants had a higher suicide rate.
- They compared the suicide rates and had his prediction supported by official statistics. The comparative method helps to avoid artificiality, has no ethical problems, and can study the past.
8
Q
Eval (Validity)-
A
- The comparative method gives less control over variables than field experiments do, so we can’t be sure that a thought experiment really has discovered the cause of something, making it less valid.
