Levine et al (Social Area)

Question 1

Levine Aims

Answer 1

• To determine if a city’s tendency to offer non-emergency help to strangers is stable across situations over a wide range of cultures
• to research whether substantial variation occurs
• to identify country-level variables that might relate to differences in helping

Question 2

Levine Methods

Answer 2

1) Accidentally dropping a pen = 214 men and 210 women were passed in the street and participants were score as having helped if they called back to the experimenter

2) experimenter walking with a limp and wearing a leg brace dropping magazines and struggling to pick them up. A total of 253 men and 240 were approached

3) Experimenter dressed as a blind person in dark glasses with a white cane waiting to cross the street. A total of 281 trials were conducted.

All experimenters were male and of college age and is dressed neatly

Question 3

Levine Results

Answer 3

1) the only cultural variable that showed a significant correlation to helping behaviour was economic productivity. Countries where residents had higher per capita purchasing power tended to be less helpful overall

2) cities from latin America and Spain were all above the mean in overall helping and on average were more helpful than the other international cities

Question 4

Levine Conclusions

Answer 4

The helping of strangers is characteristic of a place and there are large cross culture; variation in helping rates

Question 5

Levine Evaluation

Answer 5

Validity:
This research included a series of field experiments where the variables were highly controlled. Extraneous variables such as gender were controlled by having all male experimenters which increases the internal validity of the study and the ecological validity was high as it was true to life

Reliability:
The study was low in internal reliability with a large series of studies and it is impossible to control for standardisation of procedure. Levine et al did try and increase the reliability by training the experimenters to try and make the experiences as similar as possible

Sampling Bias and Ethnocentrism:
There was a large random sample of participants. The samples were also reasonably well matched between the different cities. The wide range of different cultural contexts the participants were taken from results are generalisable and the study is therefore not biased or ethnocentric