Question: what`s the consequenses if you do something wrong in a experiment????

Claudia Krehl answered on 9 Mar 2013:

There are lots of things that can go wrong in an experiment. In the research that I do experiments usually involve people, so it is not like the ones you do in your chemistry lesson. I usually try to see how behaviour changes when something else happens. For instance I might look into how people use their mobile phone when they are alone and how they use it when they are together with friends and family.

A lot of time goes into experiments before you carry them out so that you can reduce the chance of any mistakes happening. I then also carry out some pilots, i.e. we test run the experiment with a short number of people to ensure that everything works as we expect it to be.

If then something still goes wrong, there is a number of ways to react to it. You may just have to do it again and correct your mistake. This sort of thing is probably more likely in natural sciences so it is less likely to be the right step for me when I carry out experiments with people. If there is a mistake in my experiments I do two things. First, I make sure I learn from it. This is an obvious thing to say, but it is very easy to repeat the same mistakes again. Also, even though the experiment may have gone wrong in some way you can still use the outcomes to get interesting outcomes. When you work with people this is often the case. When something goes wrong it doesn’t mean that it isn’t valueable.