Psychology Homework set 19

1a. Volunteer sampling
1b. Even though a large number of people may respond, these will only include people who actually saw the advertisement – no one else would have a chance of being selected. Therefore the sample is biased and cannot be generalised to the population.
1c. independent variable – the interview Dependant variable – number of items recalled
1d. There are no order effects so both groups don’t get better through practice (learning effect) or gets worse through being bored or tired (fatigue effect), as they only take part in one condition, therefore they are less likely to show demand characteristics.
1e. The psychologists did show awareness of the code of ethics because the advertisement informed participants about what they were volunteering for, so they would be watching a film of a violent crime and that they would be interviewed about the content by a male police officer before they decided to volunteer. This meant that participants could give them informed consent to participate, so deception wasn’t used by them, therefore complying with the code. However, they weren’t informed about their right to withdraw from the experiment, suggesting that they may not have fully complied with the BPS guidelines.
2. Content analysis is a way of analysing data such as text using coding units. For this experiment the mothers were asked to write down how their child behaved every day for two week before and after they had started day care.
So the researcher could create a checklist, including categories, such as, how often they cried, slept, ate and were aggressive etc. By reading through the mother’s diary the researcher can then write up all the relevant information and use this to make a tally of how often those behaviours occurred from the checklist. So the qualitative data is analysed to see how much is said about it in the diary and then a statistical analysis can then be carried out, using the information from before and after day care.
2b. Limitations of this experiment can include, the mother not having enough time to write much in the diary which would limit the data given to the researcher. Also, both the mother and the researcher could be bias as the mother may interpret her child’s behaviour differently therefore recorded it in the diary according to what she thinks the behaviour was. The researcher could be bias in interpreting the information in the diary and could put certain behaviours in a certain category e.g. a tantrum could be put into aggression whereas the mother may have said the child was crying. This affects the accuracy and the reliability of the results gathered.
3a. An aim of this study is to find out whether their ability to identify the person is affected by age.
3b. The participants weren’t aware they were taking part in the experiment so they didn’t show any demand characteristics and acted normally, as they would have remembered Dave if they knew they were taking part in the experiment. Therefore, the study has high ecological validity and the results can be generalised to the population in real life situations.
3c. The sampling technique used is opportunity sampling.
This is when the researcher samples whoever is available and willing to be studied. This mean that the sample is unlikely to be representative of a target group or population as a whole because not everybody has a chance of being chosen therefore we cannot generalise the results. However this method is the most convenient as it would be difficult to have the names of all the people in the street at the time of the study so other sampling methods, such as, random sampling wouldn’t be appropriate. In addition, the researcher would have gathered results which were influenced by demand characteristics as volunteers would have known that they are taking part in an experiment, therefore the researcher couldn’t advertise for volunteers.
3d. An extraneous variable could have been the time of