OCR Psychology G544 revision thread!

I am sure validity has come up as a whole?

if you use participants under the age of 16, would it be justifiable if you gained consent from their parents?

also, it often says in section A 'you must collect at least ordinal level data'. My teacher says this means you can collect interval or ordinal when you say this, but not nominal? Just to check, is this correct?

Section A: What to include in an Experiment:

Think: Who, What, Where, When, How ... NOT WHY? YOU WILL GET 0 FOR ANY EVALUATION!

Start of with the aim of the study...

1. What?

- IV - State the IV and say how it's operationalised (i.e. what the 2 groups are).
- DV - State the DV and how it'd operationalised (e.g. the behaviour of the Participants).

2. Who?

- Sample size and any relevant characteristics
- HOW you'd recruit the P's (the sample) and what sampling method you'd use with an explanation.
- How would they be allocated to the relevant conditions? (i.e random allocation - such as flipping a coin, or pulling names out of a hat)

3. Where?

- Where exactly would your study take place? (NB. Somewhere that's easily accessible to you, such as a college canteen perhaps)

4. When?

- When would your study be carried out? (Pick a day and time)

5. How?

- This part requires a step-by-step procedure from the moment you've recruited your P's until you let them go.

- What materials are you going to use? e.g. if it's a test of some sort, pens, paper, stop watch etc.
- Timings? Do they have a minute/5 mins to do a survey etc.
- What data is being collected from them and what exactly are they doing? Qualitative/Quantitative etc.
-Mention the experimental design clearly. i.e. independent measures etc.

Hope this helps

i just went through all of the papers and it didn't appear. When I say it hasn't come up, I mean as a whole question for question 8 or 9, I don't mean the questions such as 8e or 9e you can check if you want but I didn't see it!

Section A: What to include in an Experiment:

Think: Who, What, Where, When, How ... NOT WHY? YOU WILL GET 0 FOR ANY EVALUATION!

Start of with the aim of the study...

1. What?

- IV - State the IV and say how it's operationalised (i.e. what the 2 groups are).
- DV - State the DV and how it'd operationalised (e.g. the behaviour of the Participants).

2. Who?

- Sample size and any relevant characteristics
- HOW you'd recruit the P's (the sample) and what sampling method you'd use with an explanation.
- How would they be allocated to the relevant conditions? (i.e random allocation - such as flipping a coin, or pulling names out of a hat)

3. Where?

- Where exactly would your study take place? (NB. Somewhere that's easily accessible to you, such as a college canteen perhaps)

4. When?

- When would your study be carried out? (Pick a day and time)

5. How?

- This part requires a step-by-step procedure from the moment you've recruited your P's until you let them go.

- What materials are you going to use? e.g. if it's a test of some sort, pens, paper, stop watch etc.
- Timings? Do they have a minute/5 mins to do a survey etc.
- What data is being collected from them and what exactly are they doing? Qualitative/Quantitative etc.
-Mention the experimental design clearly. i.e. independent measures etc.

Hope this helps

Thanks, would you say a method is likely to come up for section B?

i'm quite tedious with question B but I end up writing loads :/ the amount of lines they give is never enough! thanks for this anyways

Haha it took me weeks to make it precise and simple, the first time i did a mock, i did 4 pages and my teacher crossed so much out and said i waffled too much, so keep practicing it will become so much easier. The who, what, where, when can be done in essentially 4-5 lines. It's the how that's the important part as that's the bit which gives you the 13 marks for replicability and then the other 6 for feasibility.

I am not too sure what to revise for section B

Also a lot of you are asking for a model answer to a correlation 19 marker so this answer is the Q my Psychology teacher set for my mock exam and I got 19/19 for it. This isn't the ONLY way it can be answered, but it shows you how simplistic it needs to be. Hope this helps you all.


The aim of the research was to investigate the relationship between the number of friends a person had and how often they socialise per month. The first variable, 'friends', was measured by asking P's how many friends they had on the social networking site, Facebook. The second variable, socialising, was measured as a score between 0-30, where a score of 0 represented a person never socialises, and a score of 30 meant a person socialises every day.

The sample consisted of an opportunity sample of 10 students from a local college. They were found in the college canteen at 10am on a Thursday morning, and were the first 10 students that came into the canteen. The P's were asked if they'd like to take part in a psychology research study, and then were asked 2 q's using a verbal self-report. Firstly, P's were asked 'How many friends do you have on Facebook?' The score was recorded as a whole number. If P's didn't have a Facebook account, they were thanked for their time but weren't used as a P in the study. If they were unsure of the exact number of friends they had, we asked them to give an approximate figure. The second Q they were asked was, "How many times on average do you go out socialising in a month?" This was recorded as a score of between 0 (no times socialising in a month) and 30 (socialising every day of the month).

Once these q's have been asked, P's were thanked for their time and reminded of their right to withdraw their data. The data from each variable was plotted in a scattergraph for analysis.

Mark: 19/19

Also a lot of you are asking for a model answer to a correlation 19 marker so this answer is the Q my Psychology teacher set for my mock exam and I got 19/19 for it. This isn't the ONLY way it can be answered, but it shows you how simplistic it needs to be. Hope this helps you all.


The aim of the research was to investigate the relationship between the number of friends a person had and how often they socialise per month. The first variable, 'friends', was measured by asking P's how many friends they had on the social networking site, Facebook. The second variable, socialising, was measured as a score between 0-30, where a score of 0 represented a person never socialises, and a score of 30 meant a person socialises every day.

The sample consisted of an opportunity sample of 10 students from a local college. They were found in the college canteen at 10am on a Thursday morning, and were the first 10 students that came into the canteen. The P's were asked if they'd like to take part in a psychology research study, and then were asked 2 q's using a verbal self-report. Firstly, P's were asked 'How many friends do you have on Facebook?' The score was recorded as a whole number. If P's didn't have a Facebook account, they were thanked for their time but weren't used as a P in the study. If they were unsure of the exact number of friends they had, we asked them to give an approximate figure. The second Q they were asked was, "How many times on average do you go out socialising in a month?" This was recorded as a score of between 0 (no times socialising in a month) and 30 (socialising every day of the month).

Once these q's have been asked, P's were thanked for their time and reminded of their right to withdraw their data. The data from each variable was plotted in a scattergraph for analysis.

Mark: 19/19

19 Marker model answer for Experiments:

Again I must emphasise this is just a model answer and it's not the ONLY way it can be answered. These model answers should only be used as a guideline (and are for a mock question my teacher set)

The aim of the research was to investigate whether context cues aided memory recall. The IV in this study was whether context cues were present or absent, and the DV was memory. This was operationalised by the number of words P's could correctly recall from a list.

A lab experiment with an independent measures design was used, where all P's were asked to learn a list of 40 words in 2 minutes. These words were divided up into 8 different categories, with 5 words in each category. For example, one category was 'fruit' and the words in this category were: apple;lemon;cherry;grape and plum. P's then had to recall as many of the 40 words as they could in 2 minutes, which was timed using a stopwatch. P's in the condition where context cues were present were given a sheet of paper with the 8 original category headings on to aid their recall. P's in the condition where context cues were absent were given a blank sheet of paper where they had to freely recall as many of the 40 words they could remember in 2 minutes.

20 student participants completed the experiment altogether, and they were an opportunity sample gathered from various locations in a local college. The P's were randomly allocated to either the 'context cues were present' condition of 'context cues were absent' condition by drawing their names randomly out of a hat. When each participant had completed the experiment, a score of between 0 and 40 correctly recalled words was collected from each of them for later analysis.

(In terms of ethical considerations, my teacher (who is also an OCR examiner) said you don't need to talk about ethics so long as it isn't an unethical experiment e.g. you recruit participants who are drug dealers or something stupid like that).

Mark: 19/19