practical issues - classic studies Flashcards
practical issues in social classic study
sherif’s study lacks generalisability because he only uses white boys from protestant backgrounds
It’s not reliable because it is a field experiment and so variables can’t be tightly controlled causing extraneous variables to effect study.
Sherif has low ecological validity as it’s a summer camp which is a natural setting for 11 year old boys.
Sherif has task validity as it was normal for boys to play baseball games and do competition s with each other in a summer camp.
practical issues in cognitive classic study
Baddeley has low ecological validity because he tests his patients under lab conditions.
he has well controlled procedures as all pp’s made to read out the same lists of 10 words in sequential order and so can be repeated to increase confidence in findings.
it is also not generalisable because his sample included young 75 service men from the army and so not representative of women and people with different occupations.
Baddeley has low internal validity because he did not control his confounding variables. The procedure did not role out STM as an influence on later recall from LTM because pp’s could still rehearse words between learning trials.
practical issues in biological classic study
Raine has high consistency with his neuro-imaging so the results have higher reliability
People expressed concern over simplification of criminal behaviour to brain sample which decreased validity.
NGRI was used which lacks generalisability as they had no offenders pleading guilty.
Raine’s findings were invalid because PET scans show neuronal activity but don’t take into account environmental factors e.g. upbringing
practical issues in learning classic study
Little Albert was a case study and so was not generalisable to society because it was based on one child ideographic.
They used standardised procedure e.g. they showed little Albert the white rat before conditioning to make a baseline measure and prove that fear had been conditioned.
Little Albert has low ecological validity as the study was carried out in an artificial lab, so it could’ve been the unfamiliar environment making him distressed.
However, the study has high inter-rater reliability as multiple people were observing little Albert at the same time and so not exposed to researcher bias.
practical issues in clinical classic study
Rosenhan was not generalisable to society because he only used a low sample size of 8 pseudo-patients and it was only carried out in 5 states in USA.
However, it is reliable because it has standardised procedure. All pseudo-patients describes they heard voices saying “empty, hollow, thud”.
Rosenhan has high ecological validity because he used a covert observation of undercover pesudo-patients and so clinicians were unaware they were being studied at all (field experiment) representable of real life human behaviour.
However, it was not valid because the pseudo patients were supporters of Rosenhan.
