OCR Psychology Section B Core

In Section B of the core studies paper, when you get a question such as the following, ' Compare the cognitive area and the psychodynamic perspective in terms of strengths and
weaknesses' (8 marks), how many points/strength and/or weaknesses do you need to discuss?

Reply 1

Endoftheuniverse

For a question like this I’d say that the actual comparison is more important than the strengths/weaknesses, so your marks are gonna come from how well you compare them rather than anything else.

I’d say compare one way in which they’re similar, e.g., they are both deterministic because they provide cause and effect relationships, this is a strength because it means they both support psychology as a science, the cognitive area is deterministic because… the psychodynamic area is deterministic because…

And then I would have a second paragraph comparing how they are different, you could still use a strength here, but it would be good to include a weakness for balance, e.g., the cognitive area has high population validity, while the psychodynamic perspective has low population validity, for example Grant et al’a study… this is a strength because… however Freud’s study… this is a weakness because it is not representative and research cannot be generalised

For an 8 mark question you wouldn’t need any more than those two paragraphs. I know this reply it a bit late but I hope this helped :smile: