The Pros And Cons Of Early Conservation Experiments

Psychologists routinely face a multitude of methodological challenges when conducting research in general, however when carrying out research on children, the problems they face are even greater. In this essay, I will explore the methodological problems that psychologists face when investigating infants and evaluate the methods developed to address the challenges.
There has been many criticisms of early conservation experiments (such as Piaget’s) carried out on children. It has been suggested that asking the same question twice could act as a demand characteristic and cause children to change their answers. Samuel and Bryant (1984) replicated early conservation experiments but tweaked the method to investigate whether changing how questions
At the time, it was understood that “cultural deprivation” was causing black New York City children to underperform in English tests at school. However, Labov argued that the children were not limited in grammar and did not have poor verbal skills, he believed that their dialect was different rather than inferior to white middle class English. He suggested that previous research had misrepresented and misunderstood the children, as research normally involved a white middle class male asking the children questions which would appear “strange” to them. In Labov’s study, effort was taken to make the participants feel relaxed. Furthermore, interviews were carried out by a black male researcher who knew the children’s area well and had some knowledge about the children’s interests. Interviews were carried out with the children before and after the strategies (to help the participants feel more relaxed) were implemented. The first interview with an 8 year old participant called “Leon” is not an effective measure of his verbal competence, according to the researcher. This would have led other researchers to conclude that Leon’s verbal skills were inferior to other children’s. However, after the strategies had been implemented to make Leon feel more at ease, his performance was significantly improved. This underlines the difficulty of measuring actual competence,
Expectancy effects are results that a researcher generates, by subconsciously letting the participants know what results the experimenter expects to receive. Rosenthal and Fode (1963) told two groups of participants that they were experimenters. Each participant received five rats and were told that they had a few days to train the rats on a maze. One condition believed that they were given “maze bright” rats, the other condition believed that they were given “maze dull” rats. However, in reality there were no differences between the rats. The results showed that the “maze bright” rats performed better than the “maze dull” rats at the end of the study. This shows that the expectations of a researcher can heavily impact on the results of a study and this is especially true for children, as they may have more of a tendency to look for cues about what a person in authority (e.g. parent, teacher or psychologist) expects from them, as they believe that they will be rewarded. Expectancy effects can be mitigated by using a double-blind design, which would hide the hypothesis from the researcher as well as the participants. Or, which condition each participant has been allocated to, could be hidden from the