Читать книгу Demystifying Research for Medical and Healthcare Students - John L. Anderson - Страница 44

It is time now for us to move out of the laboratory. Let's consider some experiments which have been done in real‐life situations. There have been experimental studies which have been set up in real‐life situations – in everyday settings.

They tend to involve work which could not be conducted in laboratories – they are naturalistic – i.e., they are done in real‐life situations. In many, it may not be possible to introduce experimental variables, or to randomise participants to experimental and control groups. However, at times situations may arise which result in there being an ‘experimental‐like’ situation, or a quasi‐experimental situation, which allows us to make observations and measurements – as though it were a laboratory experiment. In this chapter we shall have a look at them and the issues that come up in them.

So, real‐life experiments:

 Are still in the quantitative domain – we measure and count, we use numbers.

 They are usually hypothetico‐deductive – we have a clear purpose and set of expectations in mind before we begin.

 They are in the interventional sector – we introduce an experimental variable which was not there at the start.

 They are prospective – we have a start point where we make our initial measurements, we have our interventions, and we have an end point when we make our final measurements.

 They are useful for answering questions about what would happen in a real‐life situation if we changed one or more of the factors in that situation.

We have less control over them because they are being conducted in a natural setting – often like the ‘Candid Camera’ or ‘You've Been Framed’ TV programmes where hidden cameras or observers record what happens. Sometimes situations occur when an experiment is not being conducted deliberately, but the circumstances are such that we can make comparisons between two different approaches to tackling the same issue and we can compare the findings – insofar as we can – for the different results. Let's begin with a classic case study.