Individual differences

Question 1

What is a strength of individual differences? - think: mental health

Answer 1

• Individual differences can be useful in improving the experiences of people with mental health problems. Studies with this approach have lead to a revision of the way people with mental health problems are treated and diagnosed.

Question 2

What is a strength of individual differences? - think: psychometric tests

Answer 2

• A benefit of the approach is the development and use of psychometric tests to measure the differences qualities such as personality and intelligence.

Question 3

What is a strength of individual differences? - think: quantitative data

Answer 3

• These psychometric tests provide reliable and quantitative data which can easily be analysed which enables similarities and differences between individual to be discovered.

Question 4

What is a strength of individual differences? - think: Holistic approach

Answer 4

• The approach is more hollistic than any other in psychology and does not have any elements of reductionism. It looks at factors as a whole and uses a variety of methods to come to a conclusions as well as using qualitative and quantitative data. It does not simplify any complex words.

Question 5

What is a weakness of individual differences? - think: dispositional explanations

Answer 5

• The approach relies on dispositional explanations at the expense of situational explanations. It explains invidual differences as resulting from a person’s own characteristics of disposition and has the tendency to ignore external factors such as the situation a person is in.

Question 6

What is a weakness of individual differences? - think: ethical issues

Answer 6

• Ethical issues can be raised due to labelling people as different. This can have a have a negative effect on people such as leading a self fufiling prophecy where expectations about a person of a group of people can come true to simple due to the set expectations.

Question 7

What is a weakness of individual differences? - think: case studies

Answer 7

• The approach predominantly uses case studies so they have a very few participants therefore the findings cannot be generalised to other people or groups. People experiences different symptoms and therefore ecological validity can be questioned as symptoms are so widely ranged