Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Psychology Investigations OCR Advantages and Disadvantages
- Self-Report
- Advantages
- Questionnaires are a quick and cheap way of gathering
lots of data, especially quantitative
- Can access people's thoughts and
feelings (which observation cannot)
- Disadvantages
- Demand Characteristics: social desirability (lowers validity)
- People may lie, they therefore lack validity
- Interviews
- Advantages
- Over questionnaires, In an unstructured interview
further questions can be asked, there is flexibility
- Gives rise to rich qualitative data
- Disadvantages
- Compared to questionnaires, they are not as easy to analyse
- Experimenter effect (a demand characteristic) which lowers validity
- Unstructured interviews require trained interviewers, expensive
- Observations
- Disadvantages
- Lack of control, therefore not reliable
- Demand
characteristics
(if overt)
- Ethical issues if covert
- Advantages
- High in ecological validity
- No demand
characteristics
(if covert)
- Experiments
- Advantages
- Standardised procedure therefore replicable
- High level of control over extraneous variables
- Can establish cause and effect by controlling extraneous variables
- Disadvantages
- Lack of ecological validity
- Demand
characteristics
as situation is
artificial,
affecting
validity
- Ethical issues of deception (especially
in social psychology)
- Tend to be snapshot studies therefore reductionist
- Field Studies
- Advantages
- High in ecological validity
- Low in demand characteristics (if covert)
- Disadvantages
- Ethical issues (if covert)
- High in demand characteristics (if overt)
- Lack of control lowers validity
- Case Studies
- Advantages
- Give rise to rich qualitative data
- Although unscientific, just one case study can be used to disprove a theory
- See development
over time
- Disadvantages
- Cannot generalise as only one participant
- Subjectivity may become a problem over time
- Ethical issues with long term and intense involvement
- Lack of
control. Cannot
be replicated
- Quasi Experiments
- Disadvantages
- Lack of control makes it more difficult to establish cause and effect
- Presence of extraneous variables may lower validity
- May be difficult to obtain a large enough sample
- Advantages
- Ecologically valid as variables are naturally occuring
- Ethical issues with manipulation are aviod
- Longitudinal Studies
- Advantages
- Can see
development
over time
- Often case studies so plenty of rich qualitative data
- Contributes to nurture side of nature/nurture debate
- ecologically
valid
- Disadvantages
- Lack of control over variables lowers validity
- lack of control lowers replicability
- Subject attrition: subjects may drop out
- Ethical Issues
with long term
involvement
- Repeated Measures
- Advantages
- Controls for individual differences
- Need fewer
participants
- Disadvantages
- Demand characteristics/ transparency lowers validity
- Order effects: fatigue, boredom, practice lower validity
- Can't use exactly the same test so need to find one of same difficulty
- Correlations
- Advantages
- Investigates if there is a link between 2 variables, can act as pilot study
- Avoids ethical and practical issues with manipulation
- Ecologically valid
- Disadvantages
- Cannot establish
cause and effect
- Cannot control extraneous variables which may affect correlation
- Deception
- Disadvantages
- Unethical
- May discourage people from participating in research
- Advantages
- Can increase validity
- Can increase ecological validity