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STUDY SETTING: CONTRIVED AND NONCONTRIVED 131

in size, number of depositors, deposit patterns, and the like, so that the interest-
savings relationships are not influenced by some third factor. But it is possible
that some other factors might affect the findings. For example, one of the areas
may have more retirees who may not have additional disposable income that
they could deposit, despite the attraction of a good interest rate. The banker may
not have been aware of this fact while setting up the experiment.

Example 6.17 LAB EXPERIMENT
The banker in Example 6.16 may now want to establish the causal connection
between interest rates and savings, beyond a doubt. Because of this she wants
to create an artificial environment and trace the true cause-and-effect rela-
tionship. She recruits 40 students who are all business majors in their final
year of study and are more or less of the same age. She splits them into four
groups and gives each one of them chips that count for $1,000, which they
are told they might utilize to buy their needs or save for the future, or both.
She offers them by way of incentive, interest on what they save but manipu-
lates the interest rates by offering a 6% interest rate on savings for group 1,
8% for group 2, 9% for group 3, and keeps the interest at the low rate of 1%
for group 4.
Here, the manager has created an artificial laboratory environment and has
manipulated the interest rates for savings. She has also chosen subjects with sim-
ilar backgrounds and exposure to financial matters (business students). If the
banker finds that the savings by the four groups increase progressively, keeping
in step with the increasing rates of interest, she would be able to establish a
cause-and-effect relationship between interest rate and the disposition to save.
In this lab experiment with the contrived setting, the researcher interference
has been maximal, inasmuch as the setting is different, the independent variable
has been manipulated, and most external nuisance factors such as age and expe-
rience have been controlled.
Experimental designs are discussed more fully in the next chapter. However,
the above exmaples show us that it is important to decide the various design
details before conducting the research study since one decision criterion might
have an impact on others. For example, if one wants to conduct an exploratory,
descriptive, or a correlational hypothesis-testing study, then the necessity for the
researcher to interfere with the normal course of events in the organization will
be minimal. However, if causal connections are to be established, experimental
designs need to be set up either within the organization where the events nor-
mally occur (the field experiment) or in an artificially created laboratory setting
(the lab experiment).
In summary, we have thus far made a distinction among (1) field studies,
where various factors are examined in the natural setting in which daily activi-
ties go on as normal with minimal researcher interference, (2) field experiments,
where cause and effect relationships are studied with some amount of researcher
interference, but still in the natural setting where work continues in the normal
fashion, and (3) lab experiments, where the researcher explores cause-and-effect