Natural Experiments

Natural Experiments

Natural experiments are conducted in the everyday (i.e. real life) environment of the participants, but here the experimenter has no control over the IV as it occurs naturally in real life.

For example, Hodges and Tizard's attachment research (1989) compared the long term development of children who have been adopted, fostered or returned to their mothers with a control group of children who had spent all their lives in their biological families.

• Strength: Behavior in a natural experiment is more likely to reflect real life because of its natural setting, i.e. very high ecological validity.
• Strength: There is less likelihood of demand characteristics affecting the results, as participants may not know they are being studied.
• Strength: Can be used in situations in which it would be ethically unacceptable to manipulate the independent variable, e.g. researching stress.
• Limitation: They may be more expensive and time consuming than lab experiments.
• Limitation: There is no control over extraneous variables that might bias the results. This makes it difficult for another researcher to replicate the study in exactly the same way.