What are the practical issues when choosing a research method?
time, money, access,
What are the ethical issues when choosing a research method?
informed consent, confidentiality, psychological harm
What are the theoretical issues when choosing a research method?
reliability, representativeness, validity
Summarise lab experiments?
- favoured by positivists
- controlled environment
- the researcher changes the independent variable and measures the effect
What are some advantages of lab experiments?
- highly reliable
- can easily identify cause and effect relationships
What are some disadvantages of lab experiments?
- hawthorne effect
- ethical issues
- unrepresentative
- artificial
Summarise field experiments ?
- takes place in the real world
- participants are usually unaware
What are advantages of field experiments?
- less artificial
- validity
What are disadvantages of field experiments?
- ethical issues
- less control over variables
- limited application
What are some advantages of questionnaires?
- practical: cheap and quick
- representive
- reliable
- limited ethical issues
What are some disadvantages of questionnaires?
- low response rate
- low validity
- unrepresentive (some people are too busy so it’ll mainly be the elderly or unemployed people)
- no follow up questions
Summarise structured interviews
- positivist favoured
- usually face to face or over the phone
Advantages of structured interviews
- practical (easy and cheap)
- representative
- easily quantifiable results
- reliable
Disadvantages of structured interviews
- lack of validity (close ended might not fit what they want to say)
- people may lie
Summarise unstructured interviews
- interpretivists favoured
- open ended
- relationship between interviewer and interviewee
advantages of unstructured interviews
- rapport
- flexibility
- valid
disadvantages of unstructured interviews
- practical
- unrepresentative
- not reliable
summarise semi-structured interviews
- qualitative
- pre determined open questions
advantages of semi-structured interviews
- large amount of detail
- fairly flexible and sensitive
- easier to analyse than unstructured interviews
