What is a field experiment?
A test set in a natural/real life setting
KEY STUDY: Rosenthal & Jacobsen (1968)
Performed IQ tests on students at a school and told teachers that a random 20% of them were ‘spurters’ who would make quick progress. A year later, they found that the spurters had made the most progress, suggesting that teacher labelling has a large impact on educational achievement
KEY STUDY: Rosenhan (1973)
Sent fake patients into mental health hospitals in California complaining of schizophrenic symptoms. Once they were admitted to the hospital they would stop complaining about these symptoms, but would still be treated by hospital staff as schizophrenic, suggesting that the label ‘schizophrenic’ is what leads to them being treated as sick, not their symptoms
What are some practical strengths of field experiments?
- Easy to access a natural environment than a controlled (lab) one
What are some practical weaknesses of field experiments?
- Cannot be used to study complex problems
- Less control than a lab experiment
- Difficult to control extraneous variables
What are some ethical strengths of field experiments?
- Debrief can be given after the experiment
- Less likely to cause harm as they usually involve making a small change to something that is already happening
What are some ethical weaknesses of field experiments?
- Informed consent may not always be gained in natural settings
- Deception; participants may be lied to during the study
What are some theoretical strengths of field experiments?
- Positivists like them as they are in a natural environment, meaning results are more generalisable
- Some structure so they are somewhat reliable
- No Hawthorne Effect if participants are not aware they are in the study
- High ecological validity
What are some theoretical weaknesses of field experiments?
- Interpretivists dislike them as they lack verstehen and depth (they only show what happens, not why it happens)
- Low validity as you cannot control extraneous variables
