Reliability - Scientists can replicate every detail, producing the same results each time. They are detached from the experiment because the researcher merely manipulates the variables & records the results, personal feelings have no effect on the outcome/conduct of the experiment.
Positivists would favour this because they are used to find cause-and-effect relationships.
Practical problems - Society is too complex to control all the variables that may have an influence on, e.g, a child's educational achievement or a worker's attitude to work etc...
They cannot be used to study the past as it is impossible to the control variables
They only study small samples, making it diffcult to investigate large-scale social phenomena such as; religions or voting patterns, reducing the representativeness.
Ethical problems - May be difficult to get consent from children or those with learning difficulties, who may not understand the nature of the experiment.
It is wrong to mislead people about the nature of the experiment, Milgram; told people they were doing an experiment on learning but they actually had to administer electric shocks, which also ended up doing some psychological harm on participants.
The Hawthorne Effect - The lab is an artificial environment so people may act differently.
Field experiments - Valid but are unethical because people don't know they are part of an experiment, also it is difficult to control variables because it is too close to real life.
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MIC - Lab experiments
Teacher expectations - Harvey & Slatin; presented teachers with photographs of students from different social classes, found that the teachers rated lower class students less favourably in terms of their performance, parental attitudes to education, aspirations etc...They found that they rated them in terms of similarities between them & the lower class children they taught, showing that teachers make prejudgments.
Charkin;48 university students were teaching a ten year old boy, he told 1/3 that the boy was highly motivated & intelligent, the other's were told he was poorly motivated with a low IQ & others were told nothing. The high expectancy group made more eye contact & gave more encouraging body language than the low expectancy group.
Ethical problems - If they don't use real students there are few issues, however using real pupils makes them more vunerable as they may not comprehend research & are more susceptible to psychological harm.
Narrow focus - Only examine one specific aspect of teacher attitudes, e.g, body language, they do not examine how it might affect pupil's performance. It would be impossible to identify or control other variables, e.g, class size, streaming, that also have an affect.
Artificiality - Charkin; used university students instead of teachers & Harvey & Stalin; used photographs of pupils rather than real pupils. It is hard to tell whether it would be true in reality.
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MIC - Field experiments
Teacher expectations - Rosenthal & Jacobson; told teachers students were given a test to decide the 20% of them who would spurt ahead, those who were identified as "spurters" gained 12 IQ points after a year, those who weren't only gained 8.
Ethical problems - Some children were held back educationally because they recieved less attention & encouragement from teachers.
Researchers had to decieve the teachers, if they knew what the experiment really was they wouldn't have been able to plant expectations in their minds, making the research lose it's purpose.
Reliability - Rosenthal & Jacobson; study had been repeated 242 times, five years after it was done. It was simple, however in terms of the age of pupils, teaching styles etc...It is unlikely it was replicated exactly.
Validity - They claimed the teachers' expectations were passed through on the differences in the way they taught the pupils, however they didn't actually observe it happening. Claiborn; repeated the study & observed the classroom, finding no evidence of expectations being passed on through teacher interaction.
However, they did look at the whole labelling process of teachers rather than specific elements, and the study was longitudinal.
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