OCR AL Psychology (New): Research methods H167/1 & H567/1 - 15 May & 07 Jun 2017

You give the best feedback (even better than my teacher who literally just said 'This is a Level 4, well done!' -_-
Thank you so much! I seee, so in these questions your not supposed to state BOTH pros and cons of your choice? I thought that it was an evaluation requirement AO3 but if we don't have to do it then thats so much better!

My teacher said you won't be asked to do a statistical test but you may be asked 1/2/3 marker questions on them, so I haven't bothered learning them because it's too much effort. But is this true? Just getting scared now that they'll be like a ten marker question on them and I'll lose loads of marks. I know which tests you would use and I know how to interpretate the scores of the tests but just don't know how you'd actually go about working out the calculated value.

My teacher said you won't be asked to do a statistical test but you may be asked 1/2/3 marker questions on them, so I haven't bothered learning them because it's too much effort. But is this true? Just getting scared now that they'll be like a ten marker question on them and I'll lose loads of marks. I know which tests you would use and I know how to interpretate the scores of the tests but just don't know how you'd actually go about working out the calculated value.

The questions will not be worth a lot BUT make sure you do know the difference between each in terms of observed and critical values and that you can use a significance table if you have to. And remember they all differ in what the observed value is:

Spearmans Rho, Wilcoxon, Binomial give you an observed value called N (number of participants) to compare with critical from the table.

Mann Whitney U gives you two values (n1 and n2) and the smallest is the observed value

Chi-square has no observed value but Degrees of Freedom which is calculated by doing (number of columns-1) x (number of rows-1)

Got all this info from these flashcards:
So try to revise them for the exam, it has everything you need to know: https://quizlet.com/121690123/ocr-psychology-descriptive-and-inferential-statistics-flash-cards/


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Hi everyone! This is a 15 marker I did today in 16 mins- if someone could have a look and let me know what they think I would be super grateful!! Beginning to panic a lot about tomorrow now

Questionnaires are often used to assess people attitudes to current events and to factors affecting attitude change. Psychologists have obtained information on such diverse topics as attitudes to body image and attitudes to drinking and driving this information has enabled research in to the factors affecting attitude to change. Explain how you would carry out a questionnaire into ‘Attitudes to parental discipline’. Justify your decisions as part of your explanation, you must refer to: • Open and closed questions
• At least one ethical issue
• Socially desirable answers
• Bar charts.
You should use your own experience of carrying out a self-report to inform your response. (15)

In order to investigate attitudes to parental discipline. I would use both open and closed questions. An example of an open question in my questionnaire may be “Describe the methods you feel are appropriate for parents to use when disciplining their children” and an example of a closed question (specifically a Likert scale question) would be “Please indicate on this scale how far you agree with the statement ‘it is acceptable to discipline your children using physical violence’: 1 (strongly agree) 2 3 4 5 (strongly disagree)”. Open questions are useful because they allow for rich data collection- the respondent is not confined by certain choices and can fully express their opinions and views, allowing for more valid conclusions to be obtained. Closed questions are also advantageous as it is easier to analyse them and the answers can be displayed in graphs so that the researcher can make objective conclusions such as, for example “the majority of people strongly disagree that physical violence is an acceptable method of discipline for children.” When I conducted my own self report investigation into the ways in which students deal with stress, I only used open questions, and I found that the data I collected was too detailed and personalised for me to be able to analyse it carefully and draw reliable conclusions, as my interpretations tended to be influenced by subjectivity. Therefore, it would be more useful to have a mixture of both open and closed questions.

One ethical issue with questionnaires is confidentiality. Participants may not want their identities to be disclosed and may not want their answers to be identifiable, and it is important to respect these wishes. Therefore, participant codes could be used instead of names, so that each answer can be linked to the other answers from the same participant, but their name/personal details and confidentiality are not compromised. In my own self-report investigation into stress, I assigned each participant a code and did not ask them to disclose their name/age/gender to me. This was a strength and it ensured the participant felt respected and felt as though they could trust me with honest (and consequently valid) answers.

Social desirability bias can occur in self-report. This is where participants change their answers to seem more “socially acceptable”- for example, a participant in this self-report study may strongly believe that physical violence is an acceptable form of discipline, but may worry that others would judge them for this response, so they may instead say that they disagree with the statement. To reduce the risk of this occurring, when asking for consent from participants I would ask them to be as honest as possible in their answers and I would assure them that their answers would not be shared with anyone and they would not be able to be identified by their answers. This may encourage them to give more honest and reliable answers.

To display the data obtained from the closed questions in my study, I would use a bar chart. This is because the data would be in discrete categories/nominal (for example, the number of participants that strongly agree that violence is an acceptable form of discipline.) This would allow me (and other researchers) to quickly draw conclusions from the data - when I conducted a second self-report study into the social media habits of teenagers, I used bar charts to display data from closed questions and was able to easily and quickly conclude that the favourite social media website or app of respondents was Twitter. Other researchers could look at the bar chart and objectively make similar conclusions.

Anything important to revise before the exam? Also any tips to gain a few extra marks?

I think the only place we could get tripped up on is definitions and pros and cons of those things people often ignore e.g. concurrent/criterion/construct validity/peer review/ null hypothesis and academic referencing and stuff? Also what normal distribution/skewed curves show us/standard deviation etc

Maybe make sure you consistently use the words of the stimulus given in your answer if it says 'in this study'. Apart from that I think it's just gonna be down to luck now

Omg how did everyone find it? 😭😭


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I found it okay, apart from the percentage question however examiners told us the board made a mistake and if we can't do it leave it blank! How about you?

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Section c made me want to cry. But section a and b were alright. Does anybody know what they were after with 'your questionnaire' in the 15 marker?

it wasnt a mistake..

5 multiple choice answers that were B in a row, ffs

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I'm not 100% sure I mentioned ethical considerations briefly for example I will ensure I state that results will be confidential and privacy of participants controlled and talked about length of question, not to long to ensure response rate was as high as possible and the use of quantative and qualitative data without trying to go into detail with open and closed questions. How about you?

I found it okay, apart from the percentage question however examiners told us the board made a mistake and if we can't do it leave it blank! How about you?