A-level Sociology: Experiments

What are the three types of experiments?

What are the three types of experiments?

• Laboratory experiments

• Field experiments

• The comparative method

What are the two groups in a laboratory experiment?

Experimental and Control

What are laboratory experiments good for identifying?

Cause-and-effect relationships

Why are laboratory experiments high in reliability?

• The original experimenter can state exactly the steps that were followed in the original experiments.

• It’s a highly detached methods → the researcher’s personal feelings have no effect on the outcomes.

Which sociologists prefer laboratory experiments?

Positivists

What are the practical issues with laboratory experiments? [4]

• Society is very complex so it would be impossible to identify and control all the variables that influence a person’s behaviour.

• They can’t be used to study the past.

• They can only study small samples → difficult to study large-scale social phenomena, e.g. religion.

• This also lowers the representativeness.

What are the ethical issues with laboratory experiments?

• Informed consent may be difficult to obtain from vulnerable groups who may struggle to understand the nature of an experiment.

• Deception - it’s generally considered wrong to mislead people, although this may be a core part of some research.

• Harm - experiments are likely to cause harm.

AO2: What's an example of an experiment that had ethical issues?

• Milgram (1974): deceived his participants in his study by telling them that they were administering electric shocks to learners, although this was not true and rather a test to see people’s willingness to obey authority.

• In Milgram’s experiment, some participants were even reported to have seizures.

What is the Hawthorne effect?

When people are aware that they are being studied this alters their behaviour.

Why does the Hawthorne effect occur?

The artificial setting of the experiment and the fact that the participants are aware they are being studied.

How does the Hawthorne effect impact the data?

It makes the data less valid

What is an example of the Hawthorne effect taking place?

• Mayo (1927): first noted this when researching factors affecting workers’ productivity at Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne plant.

• With every variable Mayo changed, the workers’ productivity improved, even when their conditions were being worsened.

• Mayo concluded that the workers weren’t actually responding to the variables, but they were simply responding in a way they thought would please the researcher.

How do interpretivists criticise experiments?

• Interpretivists would argue that sociologists can’t study humans the way scientists study things because we have free will.

• This means that we can’t explain our behaviour through cause-and-affect relationships.

What makes field experiments different from laboratory experiments?

• It takes place in the participants’ natural surroundings.

• The subjects are not aware that they are part of an experiment

AO2: What is a real life example of a field experiment?

• Rosenhan (1973): in his pseudo-patient experiment, researchers presented themselves to different mental hospitals, claiming that they had been hearing voices.

• Each was admitted to a hospital and diagnosed and schizophrenic. Once admitted, they stopped complaining about the voices, but were still treated as though they were mentally ill.

• This suggested that it was actually the label of schizophrenic that led to treatment, not because they were actually sick.

How do researchers carry out thought experiments?

• Identify two groups of people who are similar in all major aspects except for the one that you’re interested in.

• Compare the two groups to see if that one difference between them has an effect.

AO2: What is a real life example of a thought experiment?

• Durkheim (1987): used a thought experiment when studying suicide.

• His hypothesis was that the low amount of social solidarity and integration among certain groups → higher rates of suicide.

• He believed that Catholics had higher rates of integration than Protestants, meaning that Protestants had higher rates of suicide.

• He then tested his prediction by comparing the suicide rates of both groups who were similar in all other important aspects (e.g. where they lived, marital status).

• Official statistics supported his prediction as Catholics had the lower suicide rates.

What are the advantages of thought experiments?

• It avoids artificiality It can study past events Doesn’t have any ethical issues

What is a disadvantage of thought experiments?

The researcher has no control over the variables.

AO2: Who conducted a laboratory experiment to see if teachers had different notions of pupils of different classes?

Harvey and Slatin (1976)

Outline and explain Harvey and Slatin's (1976) experiment?

• They examined whether teachers had preconceived notions about pupils of different classes.

• They used a sample of 96 teachers and showed them different photos of children of different social class backgrounds. The teachers were asked to rate their pupils on things such as achievement, aspirations etc.

• They found that working-class pupils were rated less favourably.

• This study showed that teachers do label pupils based on their social class.

AO2: Who conducted a laboratory experiment to see if teachers' expectations affected non-verbal communication?

Charkin et al. (1975)

Outline and explain Charkin et al. (1975) laboratory experiment?

• They used a sample of 48 university students who were told to teach a lesson to a ten-year-old boy.

• One group were told that the boy was intelligent and highly motivated.

• One group were told that he was poorly motivated and had a low IQ.

• One group were given no information.

• They recorded the lesson and found that the high expectancy group made more eye contact and gave more encouraging body language than the other group.

What are the ethical issues of using laboratory experiments in education?

• When a lab experiment doesn’t involve a real pupil there are less ethical issues (like in Harvey and Slatin’s study).

• But when real pupils are used this can harm them as their limited ability and vulnerability → deception, lack of consent and psychological damage are bigger issues.

• This is why experiments are rarely used in education.

How does the narrow focus of laboratory experiments impact research?

• These experiments only focused on one aspect of teachers expectation.

• This means that they can study this one aspect in great depth.

• It also means that you can’t understand teacher expectations within the wider process of labelling, self-fulfilling prophecy etc.

• E.g. Charkin et al. (1975) didn’t look at how the different body languages displayed by teachers may affect pupils.

What are the practical issues of laboratory experiments in education? [3]

• Schools are large complex institutions that have many variables that impact teacher expectations.

• It would be impossible to identify and control every single variable, e.g. class size, streaming, school type etc.

• You can’t study the impact of large scale processes and factors, such as educational policies, in small-scale laboratory settings.

What are some examples of the artificiality of laboratory experiments?

• Charkin et al. used university students instead of teachers - the university pupils are unlikely to behave like real teachers.

• Harvey and Slatin used photographs rather than real pupils - teachers’ expectations are based on more than just appearance.

AO2: Who conducted a field experiment to see how teachers' expectations led to a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968)

Outline and explain Rosenthal and Jacobson's (1968) field experiment?

• Pupils completed an IQ test and the researchers used that to identify pupils who were likely to “spurt” in the next year.

• However, this was not the case and the pupils were selected at random.

• By planting these expectations in the minds of the teachers, this became the independent variable.

• The pupils were re-tested later and the “spurters” were the ones who gained more IQ points than normal.

• They found that the greatest improvement was amongst the youngest group of pupils.

What are ethical issues with field experiments?

• The potential impact on pupils. E.g. in Rosenthal and Jacobson’s study, whilst the spurters benefited from it, the other pupils didn’t and some may have even been held back.

• Experiments are unlikely to happen now due to the legal duty of care schools have.

• For field experiments to work, they often require deception. E.g. Rosenthal and Jacobson lied to the teachers about the IQ test results.

What are theoretical issues with field experiments?

• The design of Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment was fairly simple, making it replicable.

• It was repeated over 242 times.

• But the differences between school makes it hard for the original to be replicated exactly.

• Rosenthal and Jacobson claimed that the teachers’ expectations were passed on through their interactions with pupils.

• Experiments are low in validity so they had no evidence to support this claim.

• Claiborn (1969): did the same experiment alongside observations and found no evidence for this.

• Field experiments allow sociologists to look at entire processes, rather than just one element in isolation.

What is an experiment?

A form of observation where variables are controlled in order to test a hypothesis.