Can anyone tell me strengths and weaknesses of a quasi – experimental design in psychology?
Strength: allows research to be carried out where it would be unethical to manipulate the Independant Variable manually, for example if you are investigating the effect of gender, or something like drug abuse. It is not ethical to turn someone into a drug addict for the purpose of research and so people who are already drug addicts would be used as well as people who are not. Weakness: It is difficult to control your experimental conditions because you are not able to manipulate things yourself. This means a lot of time has to go into matching your participants. It is also not possible to have a within participants design, as a participant could not be male in one condition and female in the other! There is also the possibility that other variables bias your study. For example, if you were comparing drug addicts and non drug addicts, it may be that from childhood the drug addicts have, as a whole, had a poorer quality of life which may affect their performance in the experiment regardl
