Quantitative research methods

Practical issues

• Time and money

• The requirements of funding bodies

• The personal skills and characteristics of teachers

• The subject matter of the study

• Research opportunity

Ethical issues

• Informed consent

• Confidentiality and privacy

• Harmful effects

• Vulnerable groups

• Covert methods

Theoretical issues

• Reliability

• Validity

• Representativeness

Lab experiments are use by…

Positivists

Key features of lab experiments

• Control - a lab experiment is a controlled experiment. The lab is an artificial environment where the researcher can control different variables. The researcher puts subjects into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group are exposed to a variable that the researcher believes may have a particular effect. The control group aren’t exposed to it

• Cause and effect - If we discover a change in the experimental group but not the control group, we can discover a cause-and-effect relationship

• While lab experiments are the basic research method in most natural sciences, they are rarely used in sociology due to practical, ethical and theoretical issues

Practical issues of lab experiments

• Open systems - Keat and Urry argue that lab experiments are only suitable for studying closed systems as the researcher can control and measure all variables and make precise prediction. Society is an open system, with countless variables

• Individuals are complex - not possible to ‘match’ the members of the control and experimental groups.

• Studying the past - Lab experiments can’t be used to study past events, since we can’t control variables that acted in the past

• Small samples - Lab experiments can usually only study small samples.

• The Hawthorne effect - subjects know they’re in an experiment, this may affect how they act

• The expectancy effect - what a researcher expects to happen can affect its actual outcome.