A Quasi experiment is an experimental method that uses lab type controls but makes use of ready existing Independat Variables.
Quasi methods are incredibly useful in the fact that they can aviod ethical concerns, say if the variable that you wanted to measure could otherwise harm the participants.
Examples include smoking, drinking or any habit forming activity as well as other things such as someoe who has had a stroke or an operation that could otherwise alter there normal being.
An example of the Quasi method could be the functions of the left and right hemisphere of the brains when the corpus callossum (not sure if thats the proper spelling) is severed. This connective tissue is only cut when the person who has had the operation has suffered severe seizures to prevent it passig from one hemisphere to the other...
Sperry (yeah A level study here) tried to understand 'lateralisation of function' in the brain by using these split brain patients. He used methods that included showing to images, one either side of the screen on a moniter, that appeared for one tenth of a second to see what parts of the brain couldcomprehend language etc. as well as a tactile task were each side of the brain was, in essence told to find a certain object. Funnily with the tactile task the hands seemed to operate completely individual from one another.. If one hand came across the object the other hand searched for it ignored the fact entirely!
Yeah I could go on about that because it is a really interesting study but it is just my evidence!
The point is Quasi experiments are useful because like ive said you couldnt walk up to someone on the street and cut their brain in half for your research purposes.
What do you think is the most useful study method?
Quasi methods are incredibly useful in the fact that they can aviod ethical concerns, say if the variable that you wanted to measure could otherwise harm the participants.
Examples include smoking, drinking or any habit forming activity as well as other things such as someoe who has had a stroke or an operation that could otherwise alter there normal being.
An example of the Quasi method could be the functions of the left and right hemisphere of the brains when the corpus callossum (not sure if thats the proper spelling) is severed. This connective tissue is only cut when the person who has had the operation has suffered severe seizures to prevent it passig from one hemisphere to the other...
Sperry (yeah A level study here) tried to understand 'lateralisation of function' in the brain by using these split brain patients. He used methods that included showing to images, one either side of the screen on a moniter, that appeared for one tenth of a second to see what parts of the brain couldcomprehend language etc. as well as a tactile task were each side of the brain was, in essence told to find a certain object. Funnily with the tactile task the hands seemed to operate completely individual from one another.. If one hand came across the object the other hand searched for it ignored the fact entirely!
Yeah I could go on about that because it is a really interesting study but it is just my evidence!
The point is Quasi experiments are useful because like ive said you couldnt walk up to someone on the street and cut their brain in half for your research purposes.
What do you think is the most useful study method?
Thank you for the ideas in Quasi-Experiments. I think this experiment is quite good as lacks the degree of control found in true experiments like random assignment. Also, like what you said that the characteristics of the subjects in this experiment that cannot be manipulated by the researcher. For examples like gender and age. I think you may quite interest some of the designs in Quais-Experimental that I found. For example like Pretest design or nonequivalent control group design.
ReplyDeleteQuasi experements are useful as you said for things like, for example, seeing whether smoking ans drinking were correlated with cancer. However there are some weaknesses, for example in Sperry's study because the split brain surgery was so rare, he could not manipulate the age, race,gender ect..., of his participants. This lack of random sampling in the study makes the results less generalisable and reliable, as they are not representative of the whole population.
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