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Chapter 7 Nonexperimental Research
What do the following classic studies have in common?
- Stanley Milgram found that about two thirds of his research participants were willing to administer dangerous shocks to another person just because they were told to by an authority figure (Milgram, 1963).Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378.
- Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell showed that it is relatively easy to “implant” false memories in people by repeatedly asking them about childhood events that did not actually happen to them (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995).Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720–725.
- John Cacioppo and Richard Petty evaluated the validity of their Need for Cognition Scale—a measure of the extent to which people like and value thinking—by comparing the scores of college professors with those of factory workers (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982).Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 116–131.
- David Rosenhan found that confederates who went to psychiatric hospitals claiming to have heard voices saying things like “empty” and “thud” were labeled as schizophrenic by the hospital staff and kept there even though they behaved normally in all other ways (Rosenhan, 1973).Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250–258.
The answer for purposes of this chapter is that they are not experiments. In this chapter we look more closely at nonexperimental research. We begin with a general definition of nonexperimental research, along with a discussion of when and why nonexperimental research is more appropriate than experimental research. We then look separately at three important types of nonexperimental research: correlational research, quasi-experimental research, and qualitative research.