If You Conduct a Field Study in a Place Where

Short Answer

If you conduct a field study in a place where people are known to behave slightly to extremely differently than they would otherwise behave (e.g., in Las Vegas), how ecologically valid are the results of that study? In other words, is what happens in Las Vegas truly representative of what would likely happen in "real life" situations outside of Las Vegas? Would the goal of a Vegas field study be to generalize to other similar contextual environments (e.g., Atlantic City) rather than to general "real life" contexts? If you are trying to achieve a high degree of ecological validity with your field study, should you plan to conduct it somewhere that is more likely to reflect people's everyday interactions and experiences, or does it matter where your field study is conducted as long as your sample is large enough?