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PSYA2 How would I answer this psychology question

"discuss research studies which have investigated the way in which personality factors influence how people respond to stress" 12 marks.

How would I answer the question above, can anyone please give me the structure of what I would need to put in AO1 for 6 marks and and A02?

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 1

smozsolution

AO1 - 2/3 studies in detail that have shown how personality factors influence how people respond to stress. If I remember correctly this is type A/B personality and hardiness?

AO2 - 2/3 PEE evaluation points about the studies you used.

I did AS Psychology A last year on AQA and got an A; this was usually how I answered the 12 mark questions.

Reply 2

sandykaur

Would this achieve 12 marks?

Friedman and Roseman identified Type A personality; this is a behavioural style consisting of competitiveness, time urgency and aggressiveness. They are likely to have higher levels of adrenaline, which lead to putting the body into fight or flight. Type B in contrast consists of a personality being relaxed, patient and easy going. F&R investigated into Type Apersonality and the link with development of heart disease. They carried out a study interviewing American men aged beteen 39-59 to see if they had a type A or B personality. The men were monitored for 8.5 years, their lifestyle and levels of health were assessed throughout. It was found after those 8.5 years, 70% of those that had a heart attack were Type Apersonality; this implied TAB had an association with having a higher risk of CHD.

The study is longitudinal, which gives a good idea of the long term effect of personality factors on stress related illnesses, and enable the percent of those having a heart attack to be identified. It carries strong ecological validity, as the study and findings can be related to the real word and the set up isnnatural experiment, it is found in the real world. However with it being a natural experiment it means the variables are uncontrolled which means causality cannot be certain; the cause and effect cannot be established. Further, the population validity lacks, as the participants were all men and aged between 39-59, this restricts the findings being applicable and generalised to others for example females. There is also triangulation as observations and interviews are used to categorise the personalities.
Hardiness is personality type which is less likely to suffer from stress, it is seen as a protective factor. Kobasa found hardiness to be made up of three characteristics, control, commitment and challenge. He recorded hardiness, social support, exercise and impact upon illness in males- throughout most of his research they tended to be middle class white males. He found those with hardiness and social support and exercise to be least vulnerable for illness. This implied hardiness characteristics protect against CHD.
Kobasa’s research lacked popn validity, because they were all male and usually white middle class; this would mean findings could not be generalised to other populations. Plus the characteristics, control, commitment and challenge are not operationalised effectively which makes it unclear to which one is the key variable. There was never any comment from Kobasa on whether all three characteristics were equally important but further research concluded control happened to be the most important.
The personality factors have demonstrated their influence on how people respond to stress. Type A has been proved through research to have associations with CHD, where as Hardiness has showed to protect against CHD.

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Reply 3

NineTailedFox

I would say you would get 4 AO1 and 3 for AO2 but that might be because I am stingy :P

Firstly I would say organise your paragraphs out and use sentence starters like 'One weakness of this study...' and 'One strength is...' as this makes it clear to the examiner what is AO1 and what is AO2.
I would also talk about an example of Kobasa study so you get more AO1 marks as you haven't mentioned a study, you only evaluated it.
I gave low AO2 marks as most of the evaluation is basic as you mostly mention validity. Try using some studies which support or contradict your AO1 studies, for example you could use Myrtek's findings for contradictory evidence for Friedman and Rosenman

Reply 4

sandykaur

Original post by smozsolution

Yes, thank you.
It was last years 12 marker

Reply 5

sandykaur

Original post by NineTailedFox

Is this better??

Friedman and Roseman identified Type A personality; this is a behavioural style consisting of competitiveness, time urgency and aggressiveness. They are likely to have higher levels of adrenaline, which lead to putting the body into fight or flight. Type B in contrast consists of a personality being relaxed, patient and easy going. F&R investigated into Type A personality and the link with development of heart disease. They carried out a study interviewing American men aged beteen 39-59 to see if they had a type A or B personality. The men were monitored for 8.5 years, their lifestyle and levels of health were assessed throughout. It was found after those 8.5 years, 70% of those that had a heart attack were Type A personality; this implied TAB had an association with having a higher risk of CHD.

The study is longitudinal, strength is it gives a good idea of the long term effect of personality factors on stress related illnesses, and enable the percent of those having a heart attack to be identified. It carries strong ecological validity, as the study and findings can be related to the real word and the set up is a natural experiment, it is found in the real world. However with it being a natural experiment it carries a weakness, it means the variables are uncontrolled which means causality cannot be certain; the cause and effect cannot be established. Further, the population validity lacks, as the participants were all men and aged between 39-59, this restricts the findings being applicable and generalised to others for example females. There is also triangulation as observations and interviews are used to categorise the personalities.

Hardiness is personality type which is less likely to suffer from stress; it is seen as a protective factor. Kobasa found hardiness to be made up of three characteristics, control, commitment and challenge. One of Kobasa’s studies investigated whether this type of personality impacts 800 American business executives were studied using the SRRS, the sample consisted of 150 with a high stress level, some with illness and some with high illness record. The 150 were given a hardiness questionnaire. The findings were the high stress and low illness participants scored highly on the 3 characteristics of hardiness, and the high stress ad high illness scored much lower. This implied the hardiness personality type defends against the negative effects of stress. Through kobasa’s other research it was also found those with this personality to be least vulnerable for illness and implied protection against CHD.

Kobasa’s research relied on self report method, this weakens the evidence as some ps may give false info as effects of social desirability could take place; it gives the research low internal validity. Another weakness is the popn validity, because they were all American ps, which would mean findings could not be generalised to other populations such as different countries. Plus the characteristics, control, commitment and challenge are not operationalised effectively which makes it unclear to which one is the key variable. Further support for Kobasa comes from Lifton’s research that found low hardiness was represented amongst university drop outs, this is support of Kobasa’s study as it proves the finding those with high hardiness are successful in coping with stress, compared to low hardiness levels.

The personality factors have demonstrated their influence on how people respond to stress. Type A has been proved through research to have associations with CHD, where as Hardiness has showed to protect against CHD.

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Reply 6

NineTailedFox

Original post by sandykaur

Is this better??

Yep

To me it is much better as it shows you can evaluate more than just the basic validity and reliability and know how to draw conclusions from studies.
Also the described Kobasa studies would bring up your AO1.

I think this would get at least 9 marks which I think would be an A :smile:

Try asking your teacher to mark it and if it is less than 9 then I will write one up too

Reply 7

sophiegashman

Hello! just came across this post. I took this exam last year and got 98 UMS and answered this exact question. This is more or less what I wrote in the exam because I pretty much memorised everything so this should be a solid 12/12 answer. Hope it helps!

Friedman and Rosenman identified what they called Type A personality - this refers to a behavioural style which is characterised by high levels of competitiveness, time urgency and anger. These characteristics, they believed, would lead to raised blood pressure and the risk of CHD. In contrast, Type B personality types are generally patient, relaxed and easy going, characteristics that are believed to decrease an individuals risk of stress-related illness. To investigate the link between type A behaviour and CHD they examined 3000 men between the ages of 39 and 59 to discover whether any already had signs of CHD and interviewed the men to see how they responded to everyday stressors. The interviews were carried out in a provocative manner so they could see if the men responded impatiently, a manner associate by Type A behaviour. They found that after 8 and half years, twice as many people with Type A behaviour died from cardiovascular problems compared to men with Type B. Of those with Type A behaviour, 12.8% had experienced heart attacks compared to a much lower figure of 6% of men with Type B behaviour.
The claim that Type A behaviour makes individuals more vulnerable to CHD is challenged as a result of research by Myrtek. Myrtek carried outa meta-analysis of 35 studies on the relationship between Type A behaviour and CHD and only found a relationship between CHD and hostility, just one component of Type A behaviour. Other than this there was no evidence of a link between Type A behaviour and the risk of CHD. Another research study that doesn’t support the link between type A and CHD is by Ragland and Brand. They carried out a follow up study of the men used in Friedman and Rosenman’s study and found that 22 years after the beginning of the study, about 15% of the men had died from CHD, however, there was little evidence of a difference between the Type A and Type B men in percentages of those who had died from CHD.
Whereas people with Type A personality are likely to suffer more from stress relating illness, hardiness is thought to be a ‘protective’ factor, meaning that those with hardy personalities may be less likely to suffer from stress related conditions. Kobasa and Maddi proposed it was made up of 3 characteristics: Control - they see themselves as being in control of their lives rather than being controlled by external factors, challenge - they see stressful situations as opportunities for development rather than stressor, and commitment - they have a strong sense of purpose and do not give up easily. Maddi et al found in a study of employees facing the stress of redundancy, that 2/3rds of the employees suffered stress-related health problems during this period, but the remaining third thrived. The ‘thriving’ group showed more evidence of the three attributes of the hardy personality.
A weakness of the hardy personality is that critics argue the characteristics can be better explained by negative affectivity. Watson and Clarke suggest that people who are high in NA are more likely to dwell on negative aspects of themselves. As NA has a strong negative correlation with hardiness, it is possible that hardy individuals are simply those who are low in NA. A strength of this is that there are real world applications. For example, the concept of hardiness has been used to explain why some soldiers remain healthy under war-related stress while others suffer. Bartone found during the Gulf War, the higher an individual’s hardiness level, the less likely they were to experience PTSD or depression in combat. This has led to the development of hardiness screening programmes for applicants for military units in the US.