Practical issues in design

Question 1

Practical issues in design

Answer 1

• Practical issues include trying to control research to ensure replicability to increase reliability.
• The use of animals or rare/limited populations to represent general theories of human learning can lead to generalisability issues.
• The practical issue of achieving findings that represent real life requires researchers to limit the artificiality of tasks and environments.
• Some methods can be expensive to undertake leading to the practical issue of cost implications for researchers.

Question 2

Social 1

Answer 2

In Sherif’s study which claims prejudice is caused by factors within the social identity theory. It also fails to accept there may be other reasons such as the role of personality in obedience compared to the role of the situation.
People tend to respond in a way that society deems more acceptable or which fits better with social norms.
Questionnaires that directly ask about prejudiced beliefs can often be criticised for not being able to tap into prejudiced attitudes. Additionally, prejudice today is more ambiguous, less obvious and often too subtle to be detected by questionnaires.
Retest methods are used to ensure that the prejudice being measured is consistent over time, split-half techniques are used to assess the validity of the questionnaire in measuring prejudice and construct validity is validated using other measures, such as peer reviews.
Correlations between different measures of prejudice and within the questionnaires themselves often involve complicated analysis but have resulted in a series of robust questionnaires being created to accurately assess prejudice attitudes.

Question 3

Cognitive

Answer 3

Laboratory experiments are often necessary to study memory with no variable that could affect the findings of the research, for example, the use of trigrams may not reflect ordinary information that we need to remember, but trigrams are necessary to study memory without the inference of meaning that we often associate with words or images.

Question 4

Biological

Answer 4

• Brain scans are complex methods of data collection that becoming more popular in biological research. Many argue that while brain scanning is considered objective measures of brain structure and function, they’re heavily flawed and may not tell us what they claim to. The scanner must collate interpret lots of information to create an image.
• Raine et al. (1997) used murderers pleading NGRI in their study which represents a population who may not be representative of others.
• Possible that some supposed patterns of activity associated with behaviours such as aggression happened by chance. When scanners are sifting through a vast amount of information about the structure and function of brain areas, using the same scanners with the same interpretation mechanisms will undoubtedly yield similar results. However, if the scanning method is flawed, the evidence gathered has no reliability.

Question 5

Learning

Answer 5

• Although humans and animals have the same biological basis to their nervous system, it can be argued that animals do not have self-awareness so would respond differently from humans in condition experiments.
• The ability of humans to be aware of being conditioned means that they grasp the nature of the aims of an experiment and will respond accordingly by displaying demand characteristics.

Question 6

Clinical

Answer 6

Psychologists may focus on qualitative data from case studies and interviews because of a variety of possible factors involved in each individual experience of their illness and treatment. Comparison of qualitative data can be difficult to analyse, and the conclusion drawn could possibly be unreliable and subjective.

Question 7

Child

Answer 7

• Observational research is subject to observer effects, resulting in unnatural behaviour.
• The observational data may be open observer bias, making the findings subjective.
• Attempts to reduce subjectivity can involve stringent controls such as the development of specific coding that operationalises behavioural categories precisely or the use of more than one observer.
• Inter-rater reliability involves establishing agreement between different observers coding the same child behaviour. This agreement if often represented as a correlation coefficient.
• Meta-analyses are used where research in one area of psychology has produced a wealth of studies but perhaps demonstrate inconsistent findings.

Question 8

Social 2

Answer 8

Significant practical issue in obedience research is demand characteristics; if participants are aware of the aims of the research, they are unlikely to display natural behaviour. Deception is often used to prevent demand characteristics from occurring, and significant effort has been exerted in disguising research aims.
Milgram deceived his participants by recruiting them under the guise of a memory and learning experiment, used a confederate actor, rigged the assignment of the teacher and learner roles, faked electrocution and the confederate’s responses to being shocked, and even gave a sample shock to reinforce the ruse. This elaborate methodology ensured that participants believed that they were giving real shocks to a real person.

Question 9

Child 2

Answer 9

• Useful for gathering an overall picture of trends and patterns founds.
• Uses data from other studies which is secondary data. This means that the research has been conducted by other researchers and often vary in procedure, sample, design and data analysis.
• Can over-rely om published and per-reviewed studies. This research tends to show positive, rather than negative findings.
• Research studies with null findings are often not published because they do not demonstrate interesting findings so are filed away. Many meta-analyses try to use unpublished doctoral dissertations to avoid the file-drawer effect.