A higher response rate can be obtained if follow-up questionnaires are sent, but this can add to the cost and time. However, some sociologists may choose to use questionnaires as there is no need to recruit and train interviewees thus saving costs. Another reason as to why some sociologists choose not to use questionnaires when conducting research is because of the fact that questionnaires are snapshots of social reality of the time when the respondents answer the questionnaires. This means that they fail to produce valid pictures as they do not capture how people’s attitudes can change over time. On the other hand, questionnaires tend to be used by sociologists as they provide less ethical issues than other research methods.
Interpretivist sociologists would choose to not use lab experiments because they lack ecological validity as they are conducted within an environment that is artificial to the participant. This means that the results don’t reflect true-life behaviour because of both the environment they conducted the task in, and the nature of the task wasn’t true to real life and can also be said to not be generalisable to a population because of their small sample sizes in which lab experiments are conducted. Furthermore, participants might have been aware that they were being studied and so might not act normally, which is called the Hawthorne effect. Another reason why interpretivist sociologists don’t choose to use lab experiments is that they say human behaviour cannot be measured or explained in terms of cause and effect, and instead humans act in terms of feeling, choices and also individual motives. Society doesn’t lend itself to be studied in a laboratory and this is because it is so complex and cannot be artificially created.
Examine why some sociologists choose not to use experiments when conducting research? (20 marks) Many sociologists choose not to use laboratory experiments for research because it fails to achieve their main goal of validity. To have complete control of conditions in a lab experiment is impossible as that level of control over variables would require a completely artificial environment which will be very expensive. However in contrast other sociologists such as Positivists disagree and are in favour of laboratory experiments. Other alternatives to laboratory experiments are field experiment and the comparative method.
Unlike in a field experiment where the participants are completely unaware that they are being observed so it gives more of a natural response, this allows the researchers to gain results with greater validity. In a laboratory experiment, the researchers have to tell the percipients the reasons for the experiment to allow the percipients to give full consent this is due to the ethical reasons such as if the person doesn’t agree due to religion/beliefs, ethnicity ect. Where as, the percipients of a field experiment have to be unaware of the reasons for the research to allow a higher rate of natural answers. This means that field experiments are less ethically agreed with. An example of a laboratory experiment is Asch (a psychologist) who tested the rate of conformity within groups.
Another reason why sociologists may not want to use questionnaires is their inflexibility. This meaning that once questionnaires have been sent out the researcher is stuck with the questions asked and cannot probe deeper or change the questions. This becomes a problem if during the research there becomes new areas of interest which now can no longer be explored. However it is argued that this can be partially combatted with the use of follow up questionnaires. Interpretivists sociologists also tend to not use questionnaires as they argue that they lack validity and do not give
Could have been the clothes or the living conditions, a change that could have been made to do the experiment better could be to use normal clothes or have the researchers play the guards. Whether you call it uninformed consent or deception I think this is the most problematic issue in the video. This type of experiment is an important one in the history of social research because it demonstrates how easily one can become wrapped up in research and forgets about the values of the participants. Although because it is sometimes difficult to address social ethical issues you must not choose to ignore
This means that there are certain things you can and cannot do to a human being just to get results for a test. There could be a ways around hurting someone to get results. One way around harming an actual human being for a statistic could be to come up with a system where an automatic response would be given to each single shock value. The experimenter could have been told that there was another human being on the other side receiving the shock, when in fact there wouldn’t be. So the experimenter could be lead to the thought that he/she had the power to harm another person but wouldn’t. A reason for an ethics board to approve a study like this one could be based on the fact that even though it may be unethical, the results produced outweigh the wrongness of it all.
In Milgram's experiment, test subjects were asked to do something that was, on the surface, unethical. Milgram was fascinated by the way people could be persuaded to cause harm to individuals if the instructions came from authoritative figures or those who would be considered credible. Although Milgram's experiment would not be conducted today for ethical reasons, the information derived from Milgram's experiment
But because of the greediness of some just as in other models what started out as good ended up not being able to provide the quality care at an affordable price like was promised. This country does need health care reform but managed care is not the answer. Anytime money is the goal someone has to lose out. There has to be a way to get quality care to folks who need it at affordable prices so that people do not have to go broke just to stay
Also their small scale means that results may not be representative or generalisable to the wider population. On the other hand interpretivists reject the laboratory experiments because it fails to achieve their main goal of validity. It is an artificial environment producing unnatural behavior. Drifting away from the advantages, There are various practical problems with laboratory experiments. Society is very complex and in practice it would be impossible to control variables that may influence a situation.