Experimental Research: What It Can and Cannot Help With
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
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| Description | Experiment is not all encompassing magic method that could be used to solve any and every question we might have coming from our respective disciplines. It is a powerful tool designed for one purpose: to decide between competing hypotheses and offer insights into causal effects of factors by means of their manipulation. As such it can only help when used correctly and applied to appropriate tasks. My presentation deals with general criteria that need to be met for this tool to be useful. I focus both on method and substance and show how experimental scientists in CSR think about their material and how they do their experiments. As showcases I use three experimental studies, one field experiment and two laboratory experiments. These experiments are not advancing one specific theory of religious experience, rather they are chosen to represent variety of possibilities where experimental research proved fruitful when investigating religious behaviour. They illustrate the main principles of experimental method (e.g., operationalisation, experimental manipulation, defining independent and dependant variables) and more importantly they show how even traditional big questions and theories raised by classics of our disciplines (in this case anthropology) can be open to new ways of testing. |
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