AQA Psychology PSY4 3rd Feb 2010 revision thread

I'm doing this exam too. Hoping someone else doing addiction can answer this; when looking at psychological explanations for addiction, are they likely to ask us to outline specific psychological explanations, s/a 'outline cognitive explanations for addiction', or would it be a more general 'outline 1/2 or more psychological explanations for addiction'.

Just a little confused about the overall exam structure. Any help would be appreciated!

They can be specific to one explanation as they are looking for depth rather than breadth, for example the specimen paper on the AQA;

"Explain the use of one cognitive-behavioural therapy as applied to the treatment of depression. (10 Marks)"

"Outline and evaluate biological therapies as treatments of depression. (15 Marks)"

Its really up to them, my best bet would be we'll see a specified question and a not so specified question, but its purely speculation

Ok so everyone doing PSY4 is doing research methods.
Have you gone into much depth with critical values/observed values and whether or not to accept or reject the null hypothesis based on the non parametric statistical test used?
Also, just wondering if any of you have bothered learning about Type1&2 errors...I know that's super technical but it was in the textbook so I've learned it.

okay probably me being really dumb and frazzled by psychology but on the specimen paper on aqa site for stats they give this extract

"A psychologist believed that people think of more new ideas working on their own than they do working in a group, and that the belief that people are more creative in groups is false. To test this idea he arranged for 30 people to participate in a study that involved generating ideas about how to boost tourism. Participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups. Fifteen of them were asked to work individually and generate as many ideas as they could to boost tourism in their town. The other fifteen participants were divided into three groups and each group was asked to ìbrainstormî to generate as many ideas as they could to boost tourism in their town. The group ìbrainstormî sessions were recorded and the number of ideas generated by each participant was noted.
The psychologist used a statistical test to find out if there was a significant difference in the number of ideas generated by the participants working alone as compared with the number of ideas generated by the participants working in groups. A significant difference was found at the 5% level for a two-tailed test (p ≤ 0.05)."

and then ask...
Give one reason why the psychologist used a two-tailed test.

okay i know it says at the bottom its a two tailed test but surely the top extract is saying its a one tailed hypothesis as it says they believe more ideas generated on own rather than group. help!?!?!?! really confused..

Yep, type 1 and 2 errors are specifically mentioned in the spec so we could be asked about them directly. Regarding the critical and observed values, I'm literally just gonna learn the definitions from the textbook, and I've no idea about basing the rejection of the null hypothesis on the statistical test - what do you mean?

well if you've used mann whitney or wilcoxon, the observed value has to be equal to or less than the critical value to reject the null hypothesis and accept the hypothesis. and when you've used chi square or spearmans rho, the observed value has to be equal to or higher than the critical value for you to reject the null hypothesis and accept the hypothesis. i think that is probably too technical, and my teacher only went through this in our very extended lesson which only 3 of us attended (all expected to get A's) and tbh i don't think anyone in our class has gone into that much depth...

Personally, I would ignore the first part of the extract and focus on what you know about the use of two-tailed tests.

Firstly you would say why a psychologist may use a two-tailed test (they used a non-directional hypothesis) and secondly you would say why using a non-directional hypothesis was appropriate... which I know sounds stupid having read the first part of the extract.

We were told a two tailed test is used when theres no strong previous research to suggest an actual directional hypothesis. And it doesn't actually give a proper hypothesis about what they believe will happen.

It's the question from the specification paper though..

"Two-tailed test is used when the hypothesis is non-directional. Because there was no indication that research suggested the direction of difference, a non-directional hypothesis and a two-tailed test would be appropriate."

Ah, I understand now! We went over this briefly and it's also in the textbook so I'm sure we do need to know it - it just seems like your teacher outlined it a lot better than ours had, "if the test has got an 'R' in it, the observed value has to be equal to or greater than the critical value" was what we got.

lol for real...teacher is photocopying pages she thinks we need but no they cant apparently afford to buy us text books. the sheets we are getting are from the second book i think. just a bit restricting when coming to revise thank you