Types of Experiments.

In Psychology, there are many ways to obtain data. The big three are:

Field 

They are conducted in the everyday, or natural environment of the participants, but situations are artificially set up.

The experimenter manipulates the IV, but in a real life setting, so hence he has no control over extraneous variables.

Strengths:

• High in ecological validity
• Participants are unaware of the experiment - avoid demand characteristics

Limitations:

• Experiments are much harder to control confounding variables
• Time consuming experiments, and expensive 

In field experiments it is not usually possible to gain informed consent from the participants and it is difficult to debrief the participants.

Laboratory Experiments

The features of this kind of experiment is that it takes place in an environment designed to maximize control over extraneous variables to help ensure the validity of the study. The environment is  well-controlled, and accurate measurements are possible.

The researcher decides where the experiment will take place, at what time, with which participants, in what circumstances and using what procedures. You can more easily eliminate confounding variables, and get clear results.

Strengths:

• It is usually the method with the highest level of reliability
• It allows valid cause-effect conclusions in terms of the variables measured because of the certainty gained by control over extraneous variables.

This precision then allows for easy replication of the experiment, which makes it more likely to be checked and confirmed by other researchers.

Limitations:

• Too high level of control over variables, which means that the whole situation become artificial or unrealistic.
• Ecological validity is low, and results cannot be generalized beyond the experimental situation.

 

Natural (quasi)

A quasi experiment is where the independent variable is not manipulated by the researcher but occurs naturally.

 

In a true experiment participants are allocated to the conditions of an experiment, usually through random assignment, however this is not always possible for practical or ethical reasons.

In a quasi experiment the researcher takes advantage of pre-existing conditions such as age, sex or an event that the researcher has no control over such as a participants’ occupation.

 

Strengths:

• A strength of quasi experiments is that that they are taking part in an investigation
•  May not be as artificial as laboratory experiments.

Limitations:

•  harder to establish causal relationships (because the independent variable is not being directly manipulated by the researcher.)

It is worth noting that quasi experiments are very common in psychology because ethically and practically they are the only design that can be used.

Ethics in Psychology

        Ethics are very important when carrying out any type of psychological research. Researchers have a moral responsibility to protect research participants from harm. The code of ethics in psychology provides guidelines for the conduct of research. Some of the more important ethical issues that it addresses are as follows:

• Informed Consent, as in,before the study begins the researcher must outline to the participants what the research is about, and then ask their consent (i.e. permission) to take part.
• Honesty, meaning that participants must be given information relating to the purpose of the research, procedures involved, all possible risks and discomforts to the subject, benefits of the research to society and possibly to the individual human subject, as well as length of time the subject is expected to participate and a person to contact for answers to questions or in the event of injury or emergency.
• Debriefing, as the subjects must be given a general idea of what the researcher was investigating and why, and their part in the research should be explained. They must be told if they have been previously deceived and given reasons why. They must be asked if they have any questions and those questions should be answered honestly and as fully as possible.

          However, ethics in psychology research have been disregarded until relatively recently. Many studies were conducted that lacked ethics, leading to psychological or physical harm to the participants. Due to the fact that it was not thought of as wrong to simply test on people to see what happens, there are many studies  that violate even a higher level of ethical misconduct then described before. The following two violate ethics in the whole sense of the world, not just psychology.

The Monster Study of 1939

The Monster Study was a horrid experiment done on 22 orphan children in Davenport, conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson supervised the experiment of his graduate student, Mary Tudor. They choose to experiment on children at a nearby orphanage, and placed them in either control or experimental groups. Tudor gave positive speech therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of their speech, and negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children for every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems during the course of their life. This experiment seems highly unethical to me, because you are experimenting with human beings to prove a theory. Other then the fact that they are orphans, and have no one to take care of them and protect them, the subjects were also children, who cannot have much control or say in situations. It is unethical to give them no say, and not care if their lives are marked with trauma, or actual speech impairment as a result. I could bet that nobody was informed of their rights during the experiment, and no care was taken care of them. Ethically speaking, this study can be compared to bulling or child abuse.

.

 

The Aversion Project of the 1970s and 1980s

South Africa’s apartheid army forced white lesbian and gay soldiers to undergo ‘sex-change’ operations in the 1970′s and the 1980′s, and submitted many to chemical castration, electric shock, and other unethical medical experiments. Although the exact number is not known, former apartheid army surgeons estimate that as many as 900 forced ‘sexual reassignment’ operations may have been performed between 1971 and 1989 at military hospitals, as part of a top-secret program to root out homosexuality from the service.
Army psychiatrists aided by chaplains aggressively ferreted out suspected homosexuals from the armed forces, sending them discretely to military psychiatric units. Those who could not be ‘cured’ with drugs, aversion shock therapy, hormone treatment, and other radical ‘psychiatric’ means were chemically castrated or given sex-change operations. Although several cases of lesbian soldiers abused have been documented so far—including one botched sex-change operation—most of the victims appear to have been young, 16 to 24-year-old white males drafted into the apartheid army.
In my eyes, this is wrong beyond limits. This study completely disregarded ethics, and used soldiers as guinea pigs to see if homosexuality can be cured. Other then the fact that most of them were drugged, shocked and psychologically traumatized beyond respectful human behavior, the soldiers that were refusing to submit themselves, had physical operations done to them, in the means of a sex change, without their approval. Imagine a young man, in his 20's, signing up for the army to help his country and make his family proud. Not only is the army a stressful enough, and psychologically challenging situation, they accused men of being gay, and in my eyes tortured them, without any reason. If you didn't want gays in the army, let them go home.