SOC 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Stanford Prison Experiment, Scientific Method, Scientific Control
Document Summary
Experimental methods: social scientific method that comes closest to a controlled experiment. Measure the impact treatment had on people. Limits: the people in the experiments are not the same. Still, with random placement and a large sample, we are fairly confident that any effect we measure is the result of their different treatments. Powerful: excellent means of social scientific insight. Rare: quite rare in sociology because of 3 problems. Individual: better equipped to test individual level processes, not social processes. More common in psychology for this reason. Can"t treat people in a way that harms them. Impracticality: it takes a lot of time, effort, and resources to use experimental methods. Very difficult to get people to participate, requires that we remunerate them. People who are most likely to participate in experiments are university students (especially psych majors) in western societies. Applying methods: in order to clarify the methodological traditions in sociology, we will now apply them to a topic.
