Location of Research

Question 1

What is location of research?

Answer 1

• experiments are traditionally conducted in laboratories, but they are also conducted in the field and online; the biological approach and cognitive approach tends to favour lab based experiments, whereas the psychodynamic and positive approaches tend to use non experimental methods outside the lab
• A laboratory is an environment which can be controlled by the researcher in particular a researcher wishes to control extraneous variables and if they need to manipulate independent variables. it is a controlled environment.
• Online, refers to being connected via the internet to another, you may be connected to a website or could be using an app on a mobile phone,
• The field usually means working with participants in an environment that is more familiar to them.

Question 2

What are the benefits of conducting research in a laboratory?

Answer 2

• Laboratories allow researchers to measure research variables more easily, making it easier to control confounding or extraneous variables, and also easier for other researchers to replicate the research.
• Some psychologists need to utilise equipment that isn’t very portable in their research, e.g. PET scans are very large and aren’t robust.

Question 3

What are the disadvantages of conducting research in a laboratory?

Answer 3

• Laboratories may cause participants to demonstrate behaviour that is artificial, because their surroundings aren’t natural to them and so they feel uncomfortable due to that as well as knowing they are being studied.
• Some research really cannot be conducted in a laboratory because of the nature of the behaviour being researched. Some behaviours may occur in small inaccessible populations, such as observing the breeding habits of dugongs (great barrier reef). or behaviours which take a long time to demonstrate e.g. the 22 month gestation period of an African elephant.

Question 4

What are the benefits of conducting research in the field?

Answer 4

• Field research is especially useful if you want to minimise the artificial nature of research.
• When people are in a real, everyday environment they are less likely to be aware of their participation in research and as a result may behave more naturally.
• Field research allows psychologists to examine behaviour in a huge range of contexts that would be difficult to accommodate in a laboratory.

Question 5

What are the disadvantages of conducting research in the field?

Answer 5

• Although it is not impossible, it is more difficult to measure research variables and it also makes it more difficult to control for confounding or extraneous variables
• a second researcher may conduct the same experiment and find different results because of different settings
• it is difficult for researchers to utilise a full complement of equipment. brain scanning machines, as previously stated, are not very portable and as such are not easily used by field researchers.

Question 6

What are the benefits of conducting research online?

Answer 6

• the researcher has the ability to access a large group of participants; in fact Nosek et al (2002) collected 1.5 million completed responses to their research. This therefore allows the researcher to seek out a diverse sample that may be less culturally biased than if they just conducted research on their own undergraduates.
• Conducting research online is cost effective, researchers frequently use free, cheap software which allows them to quickly put research onto the internet. The costs of this activity are generally less than the costs of posting surveys, or having a research assistant complete telephone interviews. Data analysis is generally quicker as participants have already transcribed their responses and analysis can be conducted.

Question 7

What are the disadvantages of conducting research online?

Answer 7

• Methods used in online research tend to be limited, with most being surveys or questionnaires. there is some experimental research being conducted online, but this tends to be infrequent.
• Ethical issues such as consent and protection of participants from any risk of harm, may become more difficult to deal with. Most internet users are asked to simply tick a box to indicate they’ve read the terms and conditions, so can online researchers be sure that the participant has given full consent?