What are the strengths and limitations of using laboratory and field experiments to research education?
As a student you probably would have been the subject of an experiment within your school at some point during your 13 years of formal education.
Experiments conducted by schools themselves are a lot more common than educational researchers conducting their own field experiments within schools, and so such experiments are a rich source of data for students studying Methods in Context for A-Level sociology.
It is quite usual for schools to conduct small scale field experiments to try out new teaching techniques or to evaluate the effectiveness of banding of streaming.
If there are several classes of students of similar abilities doing the same subject, it is relatively easy to keep some classes being taught in the same way as usual but to change one aspect of teaching of other classes, and to measure the effect this has on student behaviour or learning.
Some years ago we conducted the following experiment in my institution, designed to measure the effectiveness of splitting students into ability bands:
In five subjects we deliberately created one class of all higher ability students (those predicted to get Bs or above at A-level based on their GCSE grades), but kept some high ability students in all of the regular mixed ability classes.
So in A-level sociology we had 7 classes at AS, and we ended up with one ‘high ability class’ and then 6 mixed ability classes, each with 2-3 A/B students rather than 3/5 A/B students.
The hypothesis of the Senior Management was that grouping all the higher ability students into one group would lead to improved results.
The control students are the high ability students still in the regular mixed classes.
We let this run for a year and compared the AS exam results at the end (it was a long time ago, when we still had AS exams.
The results in the end were inconclusive when we looked at the results of the ‘top band’ classes across all subjects – there was no signficant evidence that putting them in once class led to them getting better results.
As far as I am aware the students involved to this day have no idea they were subject to this experiment!
This kind of experiment within education is probably more common than you think!
A lot of schools put students into ability bands, and it makes sense that they review their results from time to time and ‘experiment’ to see if mixing up the bands give better results – for example, if you’ve got 6 maths groups in one school year, you could either have 6 discrete bands, or 2 more general bands, so you end up with a wider range of abilities split across 3 classes.
It kind of makes sense for schools to play around with how the split groups up to see if they can improve behaviour our outcome.
If you think about all of the things that schools can do differently, there are a lot of potential variables schools can change in one class, say, but not in others, just to see if changing that one variable makes a difference after a year in one class, rather than risking rolling out a change across the whole year group.
Variables you might change (all possible in-school experiments):
The gender mix of classes.
Seating lay-outs within classes
The length of lessons/ number of lessons in a week
The timing of ‘support lessons’ – before or after school, weekends, holidays.
How support staff are used in classrooms
Wider school policies on uniform, discipline and punishment
The teaching techniques used in lessons.
The ratio of face to face and online learning.
The practical, theoretical and ethical strengths of schools conducting experiments
Don’t kid yourselves, this kind of micro-experiment goes on all the time, but there some good reasons:
Ethically teachers and schools have to provide students with the best education they can – educational theory about what the most effective teaching techniques changes, technology changes, so teachers and schools have to adapt. Doing an experiment for a year with one class can be a useful way of finding out how to implement changes more effectively across the whole school the following year. Or if some experiments don’t work out, at least it’s not all students who suffer.
Practically, the students are there, the school is there, it’s relatively easy for teachers and schools to do experiments, rather than having them done externally.
Theoretically – validity should be very high because one typically doesn’t inform students they are part of an experiment. Reliability should also be good because the conditions are relatively stable over time in most schools.
The practical, theoretical and ethical weaknesses of schools conducting experiments
There is the ethical problem of deception and some students getting treated differently for the period of the experiment, which goes against equal opportunities.
Teaching one class differently to the rest can be stressful and demanding for the teacher.
In very small classes and schools with few classes, it’s hard to get a large enough sample for good representativeness.
Related Posts
For a great example of a really extreme experiment in a school, see ‘Chinese School‘.
For some of the general strengths and limitations of field experiments please see this post.
The two-stage balloon rocket experiment is a useful ‘alternative’ starter to introduce the topic of experiments – a topic which can be both a little dry, and which some students will find challenging, what with all the heavy concepts!
Using the experiment outlined below can help by introducing students to the concepts of ‘dependent and independent variables’, ’cause and effect’, ‘controlled condition’s, ‘making predictions’ and a whole load of other concepts associated with the experimental method.
The experiment, including the materials you’ll need, and some discussion questions, is outlined here – you’ll need to sign up, but it’s easy enough to do, you can use your Google account.
Keep in mind that this link takes you to a full-on science lesson where it’s used to teach younger students about physics concepts – but modified and used as a starter it’s a useful intro a sociology lesson!
Also, students love to revert back to their childhood, and you can call this an activity which benefits the lads and the kin-aesthetic learners, Lord knows there’s precious little enough for them in the rest of the A-level specification, so you may as well get this in while you can!
The two-stage balloon rocket experiment
(Modified version for an intro to experiments in A-level sociology!)
Set up the two-stage balloon rocket experiment in advance of the students coming into the classroom. Set it up with only a little amount of air, so it deliberately is a bit naff on its first run.
Get students to discuss what they think is going to happen when you release the balloon along the wire.
Release the balloon.
Discuss why it didn’t work too well.
Get students involved with redesigning the experiment
Do round two.
Use the examples of ‘balloon speed’ as ‘dependent’ and ‘amount of air/ fuel’ as independent variables’ when introducing these often difficult to understand concepts in the next stage (excuse the pun) of the lesson.
Questions you might get the students to consider:
What variables did we find had the biggest impact on how far the rocket traveled?
Did any variables have a very small impact or no impact at all?
If we had more time or other materials available, what changes would you make to make the rocket travel even farther?
Don’t forget to save the animal modelling balloons you would have bought for this and use them for the ‘Balloon Animals Starter’ in the next lesson on field experiments.
This post aims to provide some examples to some of the more unusual and interesting experiments that students can explore and evaluate.
I’ve already done a post on ‘seven field experiments‘, that outline seven of the most interesting classic and contemporary experiments which are relevant to various topics within the A-level sociology syllabus, in this post I provide a much fuller list, and try to present some more unusual examples, focusing on contemporary examples with video examples where possible.
The Circle
Channel Four’s ‘The Circle’ is an experiment of sorts – contestants have to stay in one room and can only interact with each other by a bespoke, in-house social media application, competing for popularity. At the end of every day the two-three most popular people get to kick out someone from the least three popular people, then a newbie comes in to replace them.
The Twinstitute
This recent series which aired on BBC2 involves getting identical twins to do the same tasks under different circumstances – to see what the effect of ‘external stimuli’ (independent variables) are on factors such as ‘concentration’.
In one classic, and super easy to relate to example, sets of twins are asked to do a written IQ test – one half are allowed to keep their mobile phones on the table, another have to put them away – all other variables remain the same. The findings are predictable – the group with their phones out get worse scores.
Conclusion – mobile phones are distracting, quite a useful fact to remind students of!
Sleep deprivation makes people less likely to want to socialise with you!
A 2017 experiment measured how respondents perceived tired people. The findings were that respondents were less likely to want to socialise with sleep-deprived people.
25 Participants (aged 18-47) were photographed after normal sleep and again after two days of sleep deprivation.
The two photographs were then rated by 122 raters (aged 18-65), according to how much they would like to socialise with the participants. The raters also rated the photos based on attractiveness, health, sleepiness and trustworthiness.
The raters were less likely to want to socialise with the participants in the ‘sleep-deprived’ photos compared to the photos of them when they’d had normal sleep. They also perceived the ‘sleep-deprived’ versions as less attractive, less health and more sleepy.
There was no difference in the trustworthiness ratings.
You have to think about this to get to what the variables are:
The main dependent variable is the raters’ ‘desire to socialise’ with the people in the photos.
The independent variable is the ‘level of sleep-deprivation’ (measured by photos)
What I like about this experiment is the clear ‘control measure’ – the researchers used photos of the same participants – after regular sleep and sleep-deprivation.
Without that control measure, the experiment would probably fall apart1
Science Professors think female applicants are less competent
In this 2012 experiment researchers sent 127 science professors around the country (both male and female) the exact same application materials from a made-up undergraduate student applying for a lab manager position.
63 of the fake applications were made by a male, named John; the other 64 were made by a female, named Jennifer.
Every other element of the applications were identical.
The researchers also matched the two groups of professors to whom the applications were sent, in terms of age distribution, scientific fields, and tenure status.
The 127 professors were each asked to evaluate the application based on
their overall competency and hireability,
the salary they would offer to the student
the degree of mentoring they felt the student deserved.
The faculty were not told the purpose of the experiment, just that their feedback would be shared with the student.
The results
Both male and female professors consistently regarded the female student applicant as less competent and less hireable than the otherwise identical male student:
The average competency rating for the male applicant was 4.05, compared to 3.33 for the female applicant.
The average salary offered to the female was $26,507.94, while the male was offered $30,238.10.
The professor’s age and sex had insignificant effects on discrimination —old and young, male, and female alike tended to view the female applicants more negatively.
Blind auditions improve the chances of female musicians being recruited to orchestras
A comparative study by Cecilia Rouse, an associate professor in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University, seems to confirm the existence of sex-biased hiring by major symphony orchestras.
Traditionally, women have been underrepresented in American and European orchestras. Renowned conductors have asserted that female musicians have “smaller techniques,” are more temperamental and are simply unsuitable for orchestras, and some European orchestras do not hire women at all.
To overcome bias, most major U.S. orchestras implemented blind auditions in the 1970s to 1980s, in which musicians audition behind a screen that conceals their identities but does not alter sound. However, some kept non-blind auditions.
This provided the context for a nice ‘natural experiment’…
Using data from the audition records, the researchers found that:
– for both blind and non-blind auditions, about 28.6 percent of female musicians and 20.2 percent of male musicians advanced from the preliminary to the final round.
– When preliminary auditions were not blind, only 19.3 percent of the women advanced, along with 22.5 percent of the men.
The researchers calculated that blind auditions increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent.
As a result, blind auditions have had a significant impact on the face of symphony orchestras. About 10 percent of orchestra members were female around 1970, compared to about 35 percent in the mid-1990s.
Rouse and Goldin attribute about 30 percent of this gain to the advent of blind auditions.
Their report was published in the September-November issue of the American Economic Review.
The Marshmallow Test
This classic 1971 experiment was designed to measure a child’s level of self-control, or will-power. In sociological terms, this is measuring a child’s ability to ‘defer gratification’.
Researchers put a child in a room with one Marshmallow. The child was informed that they could eat it whenever they wanted, but if they could wait until the researcher returned, they could have two Marshmallows.
The researcher then left and the child was left alone to deal with their temptation for approximately 15 minutes. In the end 2/3rds of children gave into temptation and ate the Marshmallow, the other third resisted.
The researchers then tracked the children through later life and found that those who had more will power/ self control (those who hadn’t eaten the treat) were more likely to do well at school, avoid obesity and generally had a better quality of life.
NB – it’s down to you to do your research on how replicable and valid this experiment is.
Here’s one of the original researchers in 2015 saying how they’ve evolved and replicated the experiment and he’s written a book on the importance of teaching self-control to enhance people’s quality of life:
On the other hand, this is a video which is critical, saying that future studies found that social economic background accounted for around half of life-success, with individual will-power only accounting for half.
(However, this second video appears to be one young guy with no academic credentials, other than the lame bookshelf he’s put in the background, hardly semiotics genius.)
The Twinstitue on BBC2 usefully demonstrates some of the strengths and limitations of ‘laboratory’ experiments.
The series subjects a number of twins to various experiments in order to try and isolate the effect of one variable on another.
For example in one experiment in a recent episode, the twins were split into two groups and made to sit an IQ test, under identitical conditions, except that group A had their phones taken away, while group B were asked to place their phones on the desk.
The point of the experiment was to measure how the mere presence of a mobile phone affected performance in the IQ test – given that everything else was controlled for (both the environmental conditions and presumably the twins having similar intelligence levels because of their similar genetics and social backgrounds) this seems to be an effective way of isolating one variable, in this case, the presence of a mobile phone.
The results were quite stark – the group with the phones on the desk got significantly lower test scores than the group who had their phones taken away, which supports similar findings of other experiments which also suggested that the mere presence of a phone can be distracting, and hence means you are less able to focus on a particular task, such as doing a n IQ test.
In another (not so robust) experiment, two pairs of twins are subject to a sleep deprivation experiment in which all the twins have to stay awake for 30 hours, but one pair ‘sleep bank’ before the 30 hours, getting an extra 4 hours of sleep a night (4*1 hours for for days previous), while the other pair are allowed to nap for 12* 20 minutes during the 30 hours.
The twins are tested on reaction times before and during the experiment – everyone does worse after the 30 hours, but the ‘sleep bankers’ perform much better, which was quite surprising.
The limitations of the above experiments
While the first experiment seems to be reasonably valid, in that it’s tightly focused, and quite narrow, and has several participants, the second seems much weaker – only 2 pairs is hardly representative, but with such a long experiment and such extensive testing, one can see how to increase the numbers would get expensive very quickly, given that every respondent needs monitoring for 30 hours.
Also with the second, I would have liked to have seen a control group – another twin pair who just went for the 3o hours sleep with no banking or napping.
Final thoughts
We don’t tend to use experiments in sociology very much, but this series touches on experiments which are of sociological relevance, so it’s very much worth a watch!
I’ve recently read an excellent book called ‘Why We Sleep‘ by Mathew Walker. This book is based on decades of personal research into sleep carried out by Walker and others and references hundreds of studies on the benefits of sleep.
Sleep both before and after learning improves memory retention – this is because during NREM sleep, the brain moves what is stored in the short-term memory to the long-term memory – not only does it store new information during NREM sleep, at the same time it ‘clears’ the short-term memory so that it’s refreshed for new learning and memorisation to take place.
Sleep can also help with ‘riding a bike’ type skills…. Training and strengthening muscles can help you better execute a skilled memory routine.
Two experiments that demonstrate the importance of sleep:
Walker’s team recruited a group of healthy young adults and randomly divided them into a nap
At noon, all participants had to learn one hundred face-name pairs intended to tax the hippocampus, the short-term memory storage site. Both groups performed at comparable levels.
Soon after, the nap group took a 90 minute nap, while the non-nap group played board games or surfed the internet.
The two groups then underwent a second ‘face-name’ pair learning task. The nap group’s performance improved slightly, the non-nap group’s performance deteriorated.
The nap group had a 20% learning advantage over the non-nap group in the second round of testing.
Interestingly these findings are remarkably similar to one of the first sleep experiments ever conducted…. in 1924 Jenkins and Dallabach got two groups of participants to learn a list of verbal facts. Researchers then tracked how quickly participants forgot these facts over an 8 hour period – one group slept, the other stayed awake – there was a 20-40% memory retention benefit gained by sleeping compared to staying awake. Has been repeated numerous times and concerned.
Lessons from these experiments….
If you want to study effectively, get a good nights sleep.
Cramming when you’re short on sleep doesn’t work.
Our education system, which insists on early starts for teenagers who are ‘hard-wired’ to want to go to bed later and get up later, is working against ‘the genetics of effective learning’.
Further Links
The two experiments above are probably good examples of laboratory experiments with reasonably high ecological validity – at least in the sense that the quality of sleep once your asleep is going to be the same wherever you are.
*Walker covers what is meant by a ‘good’ night’s sleep – it’s basically your usual 8 hours ish, but 8 hours actual sleep, which will probably require a longer ‘sleep window’.
There are 11 stages of quantitative research: 1. Start with a theory; 2: develop a hypothesis; 3: Research design; 4: operationalise concepts; 5: select a research site; 6: sampling 7: data collection; 8: data processing; 9: data analysis; 10: findings/ conclusion; 11: publishing results.
Quantitative research is a strategy which involves the collection of numerical data, a deductive view of the relationship between theory and research, a preference for a natural science approach (and for positivism in particular), and an objectivist conception of social reality.
It is important to note that quantitative research thus means more than the quantification of aspects of social life, it also has a distinctive epistemological and ontological position which distinguishes it from more qualitative research.
11 stages of quantitative research
Theory
Hypothesis
Research Design
Operationalising concepts
Selecting a research site
Selecting a sample of respondents
Data collection
Data processing
Data analysis
Findings/ conclusions
publishing results
Theory
The fact that quantitative research starts off with theory signifies the broadly deductive approach to the relationship between theory and research in this tradition. The sociological theory most closely associated with this approach is Functionalism, which is a development of the positivist origins of sociology.
One’s theoretical starting point may give rise to research questions. For example, Marxist-leaning sociologists of education have been interested in researching the effects of cultural capital on educational achievement.
Hypothesis
Some quantitative research derives a hypothesis from the theoretical starting point to test. A hypothesis is a specific testable statement about how one or more independent variable will impact a dependent variable.
However, a great deal of quantitative research does not entail the specification of a hypothesis, and instead theory acts loosely as a set of concerns in relation to which social researcher collects data. The specification of hypotheses to be tested is particularly likely to be found in experimental research but is often found as well in survey research, which is usually based on cross-sectional design.
Research design
The third step in quantitative research entails the selection of a research design which has implications for a variety of issues, such as the external validity of findings and researchers’ ability to impute causality to their findings.
Operationalising concepts
Operationalising concepts is a process where the researcher devises measures of the concepts which she wishes to investigate. This typically involves breaking down abstract sociological concepts into more specific measures which can be easily understood by respondents.
For example, ‘social class’ can be operationalised into ‘occupation’ and ‘strength of religious belief’ can be measured by using a range of questions about ‘ideas about God’ and ‘attendance at religious services’.
Selection of a research site
With laboratory experiments, the site will already be established, in field experiments, this will involve the selection of a field-site or sites, such as a school or factory, while with survey research, site-selection may be more varied. Practical and ethical factors will be a limiting factor in choice of research sites.
Of course some research may take place over multiple sites.
Selection of respondents
Step six involves ‘choosing a sample of participants’ to take part in the study – which can involve any number of sampling techniques, depending on the hypothesis, and practical and ethical factors. If the hypothesis requires comparison between two different groups (men and women for example), then the sample should reflect this.
Step six may well precede step five – if you just wish to research ‘the extent of teacher labelling in schools in London’, then you’re pretty much limited to finding schools in London as your research site(s).
Data collection
Step seven, data collection, is what most people probably think of as ‘doing research’. In experimental research this is likely to involve pre-testing respondents, manipulating the independent variable for the experimental group and then post-testing respondents.
In cross-sectional research using surveys, this will involve interviewing the sample members by structured-interview or using a pre-coded questionnaire. For observational research this will involve watching the setting and behaviour of people and then assigning categories to each element of behaviour.
Processing data
This means transforming information which has been collected into ‘data’. With some information this is a straightforward process – for example, variables such as ‘age’, or ‘income’ are already numeric.
Other information might need to be ‘coded’ – or transformed into numbers so that it can be analysed. Codes act as tags that are placed on data about people which allow the information to be processed by a computer.
Data analysis
In step nine, analysing data, the researcher uses a number of statistical techniques to look for significant correlations between variables, to see if one variable has a significant effect on another variable.
The simplest type of technique is to organise the relationship between variables into graphs, pie charts and bar charts, which give an immediate ‘intuitive’ visual impression of whether there is a significant relationship, and such tools are also vital for presenting the results of one’s quantitative data analysis to others.
In order for quantitative research to be taken seriously, analysis needs to use a number of accepted statistical techniques, such as the Chi-squared test, to test whether there is a relationship between variables. This is precisely the bit that many sociology students will hate, but has become much more commonplace in the age of big data!
Findings and conclusions
On the basis of the analysis of the data, the researcher must interpret the results of the analysis. It is at this stage that the findings will emerge: if there is a hypothesis, is it supported? What are the implications of the findings for the theoretical ideas that formed the background of the research?
Publishing Results
Finally, in stage 11, the research must be written up. The research will be writing for either an academic audience, or a client, but either way, a write-up must convince the audience that the research process has been robust, that data is as valid, reliable and representative as it needs to be for the research purposes, and that the findings are important in the context of already existing research.
Once the findings have been published, they become part of the stock of knowledge (or ‘theory’ in the loose sense of the word) in their domain. Thus, there is a feedback loop from step eleven back up to step one.
Video Summary….
The presence of an element of both deductivism (step two) and inductivism is indicative of the positivist foundations of quantitative research.
Signposting and Related Posts
Quantitative research is one the major approaches to research methods alongside Qualitative research.
This post is probably quite advanced for most students of A-level sociology and so best treated as extension work for 16-19 year olds, the material here is really moving up towards undergraduate degree level.
Sources/ Find out More about Quantitative Research
There have been a lot of T.V. productions which have run ‘social experiments’ in recent years. This post simply outlines a few examples of these and some of the strengths and limitations of social experiments run by media companies. Channel 4 seems to be the main outlet for these experiments….
Some (relatively) recent examples of televised social experiments
Channel 4’s Return to Eden featured 23 people heading to an island in the Scottish Highlands for a year to see what happened if a small community of people ‘started again’. They had sufficient resources to last the year, so I guess the experiment was just about of seeing how people would interact when their economic basics are sorted out.
The show wasn’t a great success: after the first four episodes (aired in spring 2016), viewing figures slumped to 800 000, and the show only returned in July 2017 as a ‘retrospective’, now called ‘Eden Lost’.
The experiment wasn’t a great success – 13 people left before the experiment ended, with only 10 left at the end. I just hope none the candidates had hopes of becoming a Fogle 2.0 who managed to segway into his media career after the BBC’s Castaway 2000.
This is much less ‘media manufactured’ than the example of Eden above: more of a ‘proper’ experiment with just cameras being present.
The point of the experiment is to measure the effects of having children present over the course of a few weeks on the physical and mental health of elderly people.
In the experiment variables such as reaction time and mobility of the elderly residents are measured, then the home is effectively turned into a day care nursery for four year olds, with the old-people taking an active role in their day-care, and after a few weeks, their health is tested again.
This sort of thing is sociology gold-dust – a school in the Isle of White is turned into a gender-neutral zone…
Some strengths and limitations of televised social experiments
Obviously each of these social experiments have their own individual strengths and limitations, but there are also some generic strengths and limitations which stem from the fact media companies are involved in the production of these experiments.
There are some obvious practical strengths to the social researcher – you can just watch the show and relay the results, this is secondary data after all.
There are also some obvious ethical advantages to the social researcher – the respondents have given their consent to the company involved in making, so in effect the ethics of the research are down to the media company – there are no obvious additional ethical problems which might be a barrier to research simply by using what material is made available by the media company.
Usually in terms of representativeness, media corps are pretty good at representing a range of classes, genders and ethnicities in these experiments.
Probably the biggest problem of televised social experiments is that the primary reason for making them is to make a profit, and to do this they need to be entertaining – thus the kinds of topics chosen will not necessarily be those of interest to social researchers.
The ‘entertainment problem’ also comes into play where ‘controlling variables’ and testing hypotheses are concerned – entertainment trumps the kinds of questions asked and the shape of the experiment
When it comes to validity, there are also lot of potential problems – you only get to see what the media company wants you to see. The Hawthorne Effect might also apply – respondents may act differently because they know they are on T.V.
Finally, in terms of reliability, this could be difficult because there’s a chance that people doing any repeat experiments will have seen previous experiments, which could influence future results.
So all in all, while these televised social experiments may be entertaining (if that’s your thing), it might well be that they give us very little valid or reliable data about how people interact in the real world.
This classic example of a laboratory experiment suggests that children learn aggressive behaviour through observation – it is relevant to the Crime and Deviance module, and lends support to the idea that exposure to violence at home (or in the media) can increase aggressive and possibly violent behaviour in real life.
Bandura, Ross and Ross (1961) aimed to find out if children learnt aggressive behaviour by observing adults acting in an aggressive manner.
Their sample consisted of 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old.
Stage one – making some of the children watch violence
In this stage of the experiment, children were divided into three groups of 24 (12 boys and 12 girls in each group), and then individually put through one of the following three processes.
The first group of children watched an adult actor behaving aggressively towards a toy called a ‘Bobo doll’. The adults attacked the Bobo doll in a distinctive manner – they used a hammer in some cases, and in others threw the doll in the air and shouted “Pow, Boom”.
The second group were exposed to a non-aggressive adult actor who played in a quiet and subdued manner for 10 minutes (playing with a tinker toy set and ignoring the bobo-doll).
The final group were used as a control group and not exposed to any model at all.
Stage two – frustrating the children and observing their reactions
The children were then taken to a room full of nice of toys, but told that they were not allowed to play with them, in order to ‘frustrate them’, and then taken onto another room full of toys which consisted of a number of ‘ordinary toys’, as well as a ‘bobo doll’ and a hammer. Children were given a period of time to play with these toys while being observed through a two way mirror.
The idea here was to see if those children who had witnessed the aggressive behaviour towards the doll were more likely to behave aggressively towards it themselves.
Findings
To cut a long story short, the children who had previously seen the adults acting aggressively towards the bobo doll were more likely to behave aggressively towards to the bobo doll in stage two of the experiment.
A further interesting finding is that boys were more likely to act aggressively than girls.
The findings support Bandura’s ‘social learning theory’ – that is, children learn social behaviour such as aggression through the process of observation – through watching the behaviour of another person.
Evaluation
Strengths of the bobo-doll experiment
Variables were well controlled, so it effectively established cause and effect relationships (see the link below for more details)
It has good reliability – standardised procedures mean it is easy to repeat.
Limitations of this laboratory experiment
This study has very low ecological validity – this is a very artificial form of ‘violence’ – an adult using a hammer on a doll (rather than a human) is nothing like the kind of real life aggressive behaviour a child might be exposed to, thus can we generalise these findings to wider social life?
Cumberbatch (1990) found that children who had not played with a Bobo Doll before were five times as likely to imitate the aggressive behaviour than those who were familiar with it; he claims that the novelty value of the doll makes it more likely that children will imitate the behaviour.
The effects of exposure to aggression were measured immediately, this experiment tells us nothing about the long-term effects of a single exposure to aggressive behaviour.
There are ethical problems with the study – exposing the children to aggressive behaviour and ‘frustrating them’ may have resulted in long term harm to their well-being.
Definitions, key features and the theoretical, practical and ethical strengths and limitations of laboratory and field experiments applied to sociology (and psychology). Also covers key terms related to experiments.
post has been written to help students revising for the research methods aspect of their second year A-level exams.
Experiments – The Basics: Definitions/ Key Features
Experiments aim to measure the effect which one or more independent variables have on a dependent variable.
The aim is to isolate and measure as precisely as possible the exact effect independent variables have on dependent variables.
Experiments typically aim to test a ‘hypothesis’ – a prediction about how one variable will effect another.
There are two main types* of experimental method: The Laboratory experiment, the field experiment and the comparative method.
Laboratory Experiments take place in an artificial, controlled environment such as a laboratory.
Field Experiments – take place in a real world context such as a school or a hospital.
Advantages of Laboratory Experiments
Theoretical – The controlled conditions of laboratory experiments allow researchers to isolate variables: you can precisely measure the exact effect of one thing on another.
Theoretical – You can establish cause and effect relationships.
Theoretical – You can collect ‘objective’ knowledge – about how facts ‘out there’ affect individuals.
Theoretical – Good Reliability because it is easy to replicate the exact same conditions.
Theoretical – Good Reliability because of the high level of detachment between the researcher and the respondent.
Practical – Easy to attract funding because of the prestige of science.
Practical – Take place in one setting so researchers can conduct research like any other day-job – no need to chase respondents.
Ethical – Most laboratory experiments seek to gain informed consent, often a requirement to get funding.
Ethical – Legality – lab experiments rarely ask participants to do anything illegal.
Ethical – Findings benefit society – both Milgram and Zimbardo would claim the shocking findings of their research outweigh the harms done to respondents.
Disadvantages of Laboratory Experiments
Theoretical – They are reductionist: human behaviour cannot be explained through simple cause and effect relationships (people are not ‘puppets’).
Theoretical – Laboratory experiments lack external validity – the artificial environment is so far removed from real-life that the results tell us very little about how respondents would actually act in real life.
Theoretical – The Hawthorne Effect may further reduce validity – respondents may act differently just because they know they are part of an experiment.
Theoretical – They are small scale and thus unrepresentative.
Practical – It is impractical to observe large scale social processes in a laboratory – you cannot get whole towns, let alone countries of people into the small scale setting of a laboratory.
Practical – Time – Small samples mean you will need to conduct consecutive experiments on small groups if you want large samples, which will take time
Ethical – Deception and lack of informed consent – it is often necessary to deceive subjects as to the true nature of the experiment so that they do not act differently. Links to the Hawthorne Effect.
Ethical – Some specific experiments have resulted in harm to respondents – in the Milgram experiment for example.
Ethical – Interpretivists may be uncomfortable with the unequal relationships between researcher and respondent – the researcher takes on the role of the expert, who decides what is worth knowing in advance of the experiment.
Advantages of Field Experiments over Laboratory Experiments
Theoretical – They generally have better validity than lab experiments because they take place in real life settings
Theoretical – Better external validity – because they take place in normally occurring, real-world social settings.
Practical – Larger scale settings – you can do field experiments in schools or workplaces, so you can observe large scale social processes, which isn’t possible with laboratory experiments.
Practical – a researcher can ‘set up’ a field experiment and let it run for a year, and then come back later.
The relative disadvantages of Field Experiments
Theoretical – It is not possible to control variables as closely as with laboratory experiments – because it’s impossible to observe respondents 100% of the time.
Theoretical – Reliability is weaker – because it’s more difficult to replicate the exact context of the research again.
Theoretical – The Hawthorne Effect (or Experimental Effect) may reduce the validity of results.
Practical Problems – access is likely to be more of a problem with lab experiments. Schools and workplaces might be reluctant to allow researchers in.
Ethical Problems – As with lab experiments – it is often possible to not inform people that an experiment is taking place in order for them to act naturally, so the issues of deception and lack of informed consent apply here too, as does the issue of harm.
Experiments – Key Terms Summary
Hypothesis – a theory or explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. A hypothesis will typically take the form of a testable statement about the effect which one or more independent variables will have on the dependent variable.
Dependent Variable – this is the object of the study in the experiment, the variable which will (possibly) be effected by the independent variables.
Independent variables – The variables which are varied in an experiment – the factors which the experimenter changes in order to measure the effect they have on the dependent variable.
Extraneous variables – Variables which are not of interest to the researcher but which may interfere with the results of an experiment
Experimental group – The group under study in the investigation.
Control group – The group which is similar to the study group who are held constant. Following the experiment the experimental group can be compared to the control group to measure the extent of the impact (if any) of the independent variables.
You should also know about natural experiments/ the comparative method –involves comparing two or more societies or groups which are similar in some respects but varied in others, and looking for correlations.
Signposting
This post has been written to help students revising for the research methods aspect of their second year A-level exams.
The average twenty something in the UK will spend £263K on housing over the next 32 years of their life, and many will spend considerably more, which is, let’s face it, an enormous sum of money.
What I find deeply offensive about this astronomical figure is that there are a few brave souls currently engaged in what you might call ‘experiments in alternative living’ which demonstrate that it really is possible to live well without mortgaging your life away – for example, the house below cost £3K and took only 10 days to build.
Given this, I think normal housing strategies are in need of serious reconsideration, and to this end this post provides a number of experiments in alternative housing options which means you don’t have to spend £300K on housing yourself over the next 3 decades!
The Housing Norm in the UK (which is just NUTS!)
According to this is money, a typical first-time buyer who buys a £151,000 home with a £121,000 repayment mortgage over 25 years will pay back £191,600, calculated at 4% interest. This works out at £638 a month or £7664 a year, which is equivalent to 9 years worth of earnings on the median-salary. Of these repayments, interest accounts for £191, 600 – £121, 000 = £70, 000.
Previous to buying their first property, A recent report by Santander found that the average person spends 7.4 years renting paying an average monthly rent of £474, totalling £42, 000,
Combined with the £191.6k loan repayment and the £30K assumed deposit in the scenario above this gives a total 32 year average spend on basic housing costs of £263 600. Obviously, if you are twenty-something, you have the choice to follow a similar path-to-property ownership and just settle for paying out an overall average of £600/ month for 32 years.
Obviously you have the choice to follow a similar path-to-property ownership and just settle for paying out an overall average of £600/ month for 32 years. Or, like me, you might think this is totally nuts and consider doing all, or any of the following in order to reduce this figure…
Live with your parents for the rest of your life
Squat someone else’s second (or third/ fourth/ fifth etc….) property
Live in a van
Buy some land and live on it without planning permission
Set up a low impact eco-village
A key part of the sociological imagination is to make the familiar seem strange and to wake people up to how odd ‘normal’ actually is. In the case of housing, I think it’s very strange that so many of us just go along with paying so much for something that really needn’t cost so much.
This post is really just about raising awareness that are alternatives to this crazy mortgage debt-cycle, and the above five alternatives are all viable, even if challenging….
One – Live with your parents – until they die.
According to the Office for National Statistics, A total of 3.3 million 20- to 34-year-olds lived with their parents in 2013, the highest number since it started keeping records in 1996.
While the prospect of a 34 year old still living with their parents may sound sad, it is good for your finances. Taking the average rent of £5688/ year, if someone were to live with their parents from the age of 20-34, they could potentially save £80 000, and that’s before accumulations on savings are factored in, and for the ultimate savings on housing costs, you could just live with your parents until they die, which is what 42% of current renters are waiting for in order to be able to get their foot on that first rung of the property ladder.
Two – Squat
Squatting means to unlawfully occupy an uninhabited building or settle on a piece of land.
Until recently squatting in England and Wales was generally a civil matter, not a criminal matter, However, in 2012 Squatting was technically criminalised by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) 2012, section 144 of the LASPO made it a criminal offence to trespass in residential properties with the intention of living there.
However, a few test cases have revealed that if the police find you squatting a building, charge you with squatting and you plead not-guilty, it is actually nearly impossible for the prosecuters to prove that you were actually living in the building permanently. Also, the law does not cover non-residential properties.
There are a few things you need to get right in order squat a property for any length of time –The squatter’s advisory service recommend the following –
You need to make sure you do not commit criminal damage to get into the property, and repair any such damage that someone else has done immediately after you take up occupation.
Always make sure somone is in the property, because if the property is vacant you can be evicted.
You should contact the utilities providors asap to prove that you intend to pay.
When the police turn up, do not give them entry, talk to them through the door, and finally research who the owner is so you know who you are up against when you go to court, and don’t expect them to be too happy about it the fact that you’re squatting their property.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many people squat in the UK exactly given that squatters don’t generally want to draw attention to themselves, but there are some high profile, political examples – One of the most interesting being Grow Heathrow which was established in an abandoned market garden site in Sipson, one of the villages due to be completely tarmaced to make way for a third runway at Heathrow. Over the past four years the site has played host to a wide range of political gatherings for groups such as: UK Uncut, Climate Camp, Reclaim the Fields, and The Transition Network, so you would need a certain amount of subcultural capital to fit in to this network, but if you can embed yourself comfortably into that sort of thing, then the payback is free accomodation, and probably food too.
Also of interest is this site – Made Possible by Squatting which is an exhibition from September 2013 documenting stories of how squatting has benefitted the lives of individuals and communities in London- against the backdrop of the government’s attempts to criminalise squatting.
Three – Live in a Van
Admitedly this doesn’t seem to be a very popular option here in the UK, so firstly to America for some inspiration…. To Simplify is a blog by someone called Glen, whose been living a mobile life for over 5 years in a heavily converted 1988 Volkswagen Vanagon, which he describes as the closest thing to a home he’s ever owned. The blog simply documents Glen’s life on the open road, and he also details his total van conversion, from totally gutting the original van and then installing a whole range of new features – not least of all the engine and a solar electricity system. I particularly like this picture in which Glen’s parked up with other, more typical American mobile home dwellers – it sort of sums up his philosophy.
Bringing it back across the Atlantic, El Pocito is a nice little blog which, among many other things of an alternative nature, outlines the experience of two art teachers, originally from the UK who spent 9 years travelling through Spain and Portugal in their converted van. The site offers some excellent advice on the realities of van-living on the continent.
Campervan Life is a web site devoted to providing advice on buying, converting and living in a camper van, set up by a guy called Darren who bought a cheap Mercedes Sprinter (£1000 in 2006), learnt how to convert it on-the-job with no prior experience or any significant background in DIY and then travelled around Europe in it for 9 months. He lists the ‘van-travel’ related costs of his trip at under £3K, and although he doesn’t appear to include costs of the conversion can’t imagine it would have cost more than £1000, which means that in total Darren had almost a year of comfortable living and travel for under £5K, which is cheaper than the average rent in the UK.
While there are no doubt hundreds of people who live in vans long-term in the UK, but hardly any of them document their experience, hardly surprising given the degree of prejudice against ‘travellers’. The only example I could find was of a guy (who, incidentally has a job!) who’s put a few videos up on youtube outlining aspects of his life in a converted ambulance. In this clip he’s talking about his ‘split charge relay’ while smoking a king size roll up (contents undisclosed)
Incidentally, living in a van may sound like it’s an extreme strategy for saving money, and possibly only for hippies, and you’d be forgiven for making this mistake given that one of the first search returns for ‘living in a van uk’ takes you to a forum called ‘UK HIPPY’, but there are even members of the relatively conservative caravan club who have lived in their caravans long-term, combining this with either owning a small no-frills apartment, or house-sitting.
Four – Buy some land and just build without planning permission
In eco-circles, the best known example of someone who has actually done this is Tony Wrench and his partner, who built their own low-impact roundhouse for about £3K in 10 days (picture above). Actually, this may be the only example of a couple who have managed to do this and get away with gaining retrospective planning permission, others, such as the couple who built the beautiful hobbit-house below don’t seem to have been so lucky.
Shortly to be torn down because local planners judged it to be ‘out of touch with the countryside’
For this reason, although this particular strategy is the one I intend to adopt at some point in the future, you might be better off going for option five…..
Five – Set up a low-impact community
There aren’t very many low impact communities in the UK, this is a very emergent phenomenon, but one example of a group who have managed to get temporary planning for their dwellings is Tinker’s Bubble, a community of 11 adults and 2 children based in Somerset who live on 28 acres of land in self-built houses, grow most of their own food and are fossil-fuel free. I don’t have too many about the economics of the place, but the dwellings most of them live in seem to be of Tony Wrench’s low impact design and the weekly contribution for food is only £20, so compared to the average mortgage-monkey, this represents a significant saving.
One of the most inspiring recent examples is that of Llammas. Based in Pembrokeshire, on about 75 acres of land, this is one of the few fully legitimate (in planning terms) eco-projects in the U.K. It combines the traditional smallholding model with the latest innovations in environmental design, green technology and permaculture. The ecovillage was granted planning permission in 2009 by the Welsh Government and is currently part-way through the construction phase. The dwellings being built here are more robust than those in Tinker’s Bubble, and thus more expensive, but over the course of a lifetime these individuals will save themselves well over a £100K per person compared to the average, and have a significantly higher quality of life into the bargain.
In conclusion
Although all of the above involve more hassle than the standard massive-mortgage route to home ownership, personally I think a little discomfort and risk is worth it given the injustice involved with said mortgage route – via which you pay tens of thousands of pounds to people who simply haven’t done anything to earn it.
I’ve recently read an excellent book called ‘
Until recently squatting in England and Wales was generally a civil matter, not a criminal matter, However, in 2012 Squatting was technically criminalised by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) 2012, section 144 of the LASPO made it a criminal offence to trespass in residential properties with the intention of living there.
