Field Experiments

Field Experiments

1. What?

   • Conducted in the real world under normal social conditions, but following similar procedures to the lab experiment
   • IV is still manipulated, however, an attempt is still made to conduct the research in a more naturalistic environment
     • E.g. Schools, workplace

2. Examples

   • Rosenthal and Jacobson
     • Tested the hypothesis that teachers' expectations had important effects on pupils' academic performance
     • Students whom the teachers labelled as intelligent made rapid progress compared to other students
     • Evidence that pupil progress was affected by teacher expectation and a teacher's prediction of pupil progress could influence the progress they made
     • Self fulfilling prophecy
   • Rosenhan
     • Interested in discovering how the staff of mental hospitals made sense of, and labelled, people as mentally ill
     • Arranged for sane "patients" to fake the symptoms of schizophrenia
     • When the "patients" were admitted to hospital, they behaved normally
     • The staff eventually thought that they had identified the fake patients, but all those identified were actually genuine patients who wanted help.

3. Positivists

   • Prefer laboratory experiments as they are scientific and objective

4. Interpretivists

   • Preferred method by interprretivists, who are interested in howe meanings and labels get attached to people and how others react to them

5. Advantages

   • Higher in validity as it takes place in natural surroundings not in an artificial lab
   • Unaware of being studied so no Hawthorne effect
     • Behaviour is more authentic and represents real life = more validity
   • To an extent it is more convenient because the setting is already there

6. Disadvantages

   • More realistic and natural setting leads to less control over the variables, so it can be unclear if the ones identified have actually changed behaviour. This means there are greater changes of extraneous variables so causality is harder to establish
   • Usually carried out without the subject knowing so no informed consent which is deception. Ethical issues
   • Harder to replicate a field experiment because the conditions may vary