PY4 - EXPERIMENTAL METHODS - NATURAL EXPERIMENTS

Question 1

What is a natural experiment?

Answer 1

A natural experiment is an experiment with a naturally-occurring independent variable.

They are conducted in the everyday environment of the participants, but here the experimenter has no control over the independent variable as it occurs naturally in real life.

Question 2

What are the strengths of natural experiments?

Answer 2

• One strength of a natural experiment is that a researcher gets to do it in the first place. This is because natural experiments are the only means of studying the effects of independent variables if it is impossible or unethical to manipulate them in certain situations.
• Another strength is its high external validity. As the independent variable is one that comes from real life and hasn’t been created deliberately by the researchers, they are more likely to be able to generalise the results to other real life groups and situations.

Question 3

What are the weaknesses of natural experiments?

Answer 3

• One weakness of a natural experiment is that as the researcher is not manipulating the independent variable, they have to study the conditions of the independent variable as-and-where they can find them, with whatever participants present themselves.

This lowers internal validity immensely and makes it very hard to draw confident conclusions about cause-and-effect and therefore, a researcher cannot accept or reject the null hypothesis with confidence.