Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Research Design: Experiments and Experimental Thinking 135
Ross treated these data as a series of natural experiments, and the results were
convincing: Stiff penalties for speeders saves lives.
Natural Experiments Are Everywhere
If you think like an experimentalist, you eventually come to see the unlimited
possibilities for research going on all around you. For example, Cialdini
et al. (1976) evaluated the natural experiment in pride that is conducted on
most big university campuses every weekend during football season. Over a
period of 8 weeks, professors at Arizona State, Louisiana State, Ohio State,
Notre Dame, Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of
Southern California recorded the percentage of students in their introductory
psychology classes who wore school insignias (buttons, hats, t-shirts, etc.) on
the Monday after Saturday football games. For 177 students per week, on average,
over 8 weeks, 63% wore some school insignia after wins in football vs.
44% after losses or ties. The difference is statistically significant.
And Kathy Oths (1994) turned what could have been a killer history confound
into an evaluation of a natural experiment in her work on medical
choice in Peru. From July 1 to December 15, 1988, Oths visited each of
the 166 households in Chugurpampa, Peru, several times to collect illness
histories—what kinds of illnesses people came down with and what they did
about them. When she began the project, the harvest season had just ended in
the high Andes and the farmers in Chugurpampa had collected most of the
money they would have for the year. But in August, a month into her work,
catastrophic inflation hit Peru and the local currency, the Peruvian inti, which
was at 40 to the U.S. dollar, was crushed. It hit 683 by November.
Oths continued her household visits. As the hard times dragged on, the people
of Chugurpampa continued to report the same number of illnesses
(between seven and eight per household per month) but they defined a larger
percentage of their illnesses as mild (requiring only home remedies) and a
smaller percentage as moderate or severe (requiring visits to doctors or to the
hospital). In other words, they spent what little money they had on cases that
they thought needed biomedical intervention and stopped spending money on
traditional healers.
Naturalistic Experiments
In a naturalistic experiment, you contrive to collect experimental data
under natural conditions. You make the data happen, out in the natural world
(not in the lab), and you evaluate the results.