OCR A2 Psychology: G544: Approaches and Research Methods - Monday 17th June 2013

No problem

Yep Brunner & Gudjonsson as the A2 studies for ind differences and you know the AS studies; griffiths, T & C and Rosenhan.

I think that Brunner's study is fairly ethical because like you said they simply investigated the gene. I can't really see any reason as to why it was unethical..

Great. I'm not using any AS studies. I've already remembered too many A2 studies. :P

Here's what I have for developmental approach:

- useful - look at the development of behaviour and cure it - Kohlberg - identify immoral individuals at an early age - Farrington - role models cause criminal behaviour - rehabilitate role models

- Often uses longitudinal data - indepth, qualitative, precise data - increases usefulness - Farrington - Watson & Raynar

- Due to the use longitudinal data, many studies have limited generalisability as many participants drop out - Farrington

one more weakness please and/or correct any of my evaluation points!

Ohh I think I remember more AS studies then A2 haha.. but I don't think it matters does it? As long as you balance the two?

This is what I wrote in a essay last year for AS:

A limitation with the developmental approach is the validity of measuring children’s behaviour and thoughts. We can therefore question if psychologists are actually measuring what they are attempting to measure especially as children may have qualitatively different thoughts to adults. For example, Bandura’s study could be criticised for interpreting the children’s behaviour towards the Bobo doll as aggression. Perhaps the children interpreted their own behaviour as play. Similarly we can question Freud’s interpretation of Hans’ behaviour as the case study is really Freud's interpretations of Hans' father's interpretation of his son's own phobia. Again this seriously reduces the validity of the study.

This will need to adapted for a2 and I wouldn't use the Freud example if I was writing this again as its quite a weak one, but other a2 studies could be used for lack of validity, perhaps Kohlberg?

I don't know if that helps, my other points for this essay were useful, use of longitudinal data which increases detail and lack of generalizability, so what you put

Ooh. Good point. I'll use it - and you could also add a point about ethics and children, as children may be caused psychological harm. Watson & Raynar for development of phobias and Kohlberg will go well with this point! Thanks!

oooh ethics is a good weakness to use! is W&R developmental?

Hey guys, I wrote some strengths and weaknesses of the individual differences approach, but I don't think they are detailed enough. Can someone help me please?

strengths:
This approach treats individuals as unique rather than “average”. For example, T&C studied “Eve” in depth including over 100 hours of interviews. Chris Sizemore the real “Eve” yielded rich and detailed quantitative qualitative data.
This approach recognises that there is enormous variation in human behaviour. For example. Mental hospital staffs use two main classification systems for diagnosing mental health disorders such as ICD and DSM. They are constantly revised to keep pace with changing thinking about mental health.
This approach uses a variety of research methods. For example, Eve and Hans were case studies as researchers studied them in depth; Eve and Griffiths both used interviews. Rosenhan used PPS observation. Different research methods allow us to see problems in different aspects.

weaknesses:
It’s difficult to generalise from single cases. For example, Freud’s study tells us very little about childhood phobia in general. Eve’s MPD may have been very different from other cases. As researchers study individuals in depth but very difficult to generalise as findings from the study may only apply to that individual.
However, identifying mental health disorder can lead to labelling. The pseudo patients had a label of schizophrenia and therefore their behaviours were interpreted accordingly. In extreme cases, the labelling is difficult to remove and tend to follow the patient even s/he is no longer suffer from the disorders.
However many data from this approach is qualitative and this brings problems for analysis. For example, Griffiths categorised the utterances himself, other researchers may not be able to understand the category as he created it himself. This lead to low inter-rater reliability. Qualitative data are difficult to analyse and may lead to false interpretation and researcher bias.

Many thanks

I don't think anyone should try and predict what will come up purely because OCR don't seem to be using a method where material that hasn't come up is more likely to be in the exam.. For example, the health questions in the G543 paper when there was stress questions and others that hadn't come up.

Just putting it out there, revise everything. Too risky if you're going for a good grade.

But there's only so much they can ask and as a lot of college's complained that the Jan 2013 G544 paper had 2 debates OCR faced a lot of criticism, so its not likely they'll make the mistake again of not putting an approach up


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Yeah I agree with that, it is much more likely they'll put an approach in this exam! But I don't think it's wise for people to have a guess at which one as there doesn't seem to be a very strong pattern aha

Yeah I agree with that, it is much more likely they'll put an approach in this exam! But I don't think it's wise for people to have a guess at which one as there doesn't seem to be a very strong pattern aha