Strengths:
– The investigation was carried out in hospitals with staff who were unaware of the experiment. Therefore, the study could be said to have high ecological validity.
– The hospitals used were varied (old and new, private and public), allowing for generalisation. This is further supported through the use of the twelve hospitals which were involved in the study.
– The pseudo-patients admitted themselves under a different name, meaning that their identities were protected. Ethically-speaking, this is a strength, as the individuals do not need to associate themselves with the label that was attached to them as a result of being admitted.
– Participant Observation – the pseudo-patients were able to experience the ward from a patient’s perspective, whilst also maintaining some degree of objectivity.
– Doctors are likely to err on the side of caution, meaning that they are more likely to admit a patient who is ‘healthy’ if they are not sure – the ‘better to be safe than sorry’ principle.
Weaknesses:
– The hospital staff and patients were deceived. They did not have the decision to withdraw from the experiment or give their consent. Therefore, the study could be seen to be unethical.
– Rosenhan may have been too hard on psychiatric hospitals as the pseudo-patients were simulating symptoms of schizophrenia. They were merely following the guidelines of the DSM.
– An older classification was used – at the time, DSM-II was in use. The introduction on the DSM-III in 1980’s helped to eliminate unreliability. This meant that psychiatrists were less likely to make errors.
Criticisms:
Validity:
– Seymour Ketty (1974) criticised Rosenhan’s deception from a validity perspective, saying: “If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, had come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable.” Ketty’s point was that psychiatrists will hardly expect someone to carry out deception in order to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Reliability:
– Robert Spitzer (1976) notes that the diagnosis, ‘Schizophrenia-in-Remission’, is extremely rare. He examined the records of 12 other American hospitals and found that in 11 cases, ‘S-I-R’ was either never used or used only for a handful of patients each year. Therefore, Spitzer claims that psychiatrists’ discharge diagnosis was due to how the pseudo-patients behaved, not because they couldn’t tell they were normal.
that psychology blog 