OCR Psychology: AS Revision Guide Suggested answers. G542: Core studies

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1 G542: Core studies SAMUEL AND BRYANT Section A 1a) One of the IVs was the task the child undertook: the mass task used Plasticine to compare a cylinder with a squashed shape, the number task used counters to compare a narrowlyspaced row with a widely-spaced row, and the volume task used water to compare a short wide container with a tall narrow one. b) One conclusion from this was that the number task is easiest and can be completed successfully by younger children. 2. One task involved the children being shown to identical short, wide containers of water. The contents of one was then poured into a tall narrow one and the children had to judge whether the two containers held the same amount. Another task involved the children being shown two identical rows of counters, and then watching while one of them was spread out to cover a wider area; then again the children were asked whether the two rows were the same. 3. In one condition, the children were shown the two objects and asked Are these the same? Then the transformation (such as the pouring of water) was done and the children were asked again Are these two the same?. In another condition, the children were shown the two objects but not asked any question, then the transformation was performed and the children were asked Are these two the same? 4a) The DV was whether the children could correctly answer the question relating to whether the two amounts of material remained the same. b) One effect the IV had was that the number task was easier to perform correctly than the other two, so fewer errors were made about the two rows of counters than about the two amounts of Plasticine. 5a) The sample were children from Devon aged years. b) One strength is that the children included both boys and girls, so will represent the cognitive development of both genders. 6a) The conservation task was standardised by ensuring that the materials used were the same for all participants, and by ensuring that the questions were asked in the same way for all the children. b) Standardisation is necessary to prevent some children having a different experience of the study tasks than others; for example if some of the pairs of water containers were more

2 different from each other this might make the task easier and affect the responses the children gave. 7a) One control group that was used was the group that underwent the fixed array condition. They did not see the transformation of the materials take place but just saw the two items once they had been changed, for example one cylinder of Plasticine and one squashed cylinder. b) The control group was necessary so that their performance on the tasks could be compared with the children who had been asked one question and who had been asked two questions. If the children failed on the fixed array condition it would show that they must have taken into account the pre-transformation information when they carried out the twoquestion condition. 8a) One conclusion is that the older children get, the fewer mistakes they make on the conservation tasks, indicating that their cognitive processes have developed further. b) The one-question group was to verify Samuel and Bryant s hypothesis that children s failure to succeed in Piaget s experiments was not because they could not conserve but because they were confused by being asked the same question twice, which led them to change their first answer because they thought it must be wrong. If the children showed improved success when only asked one question this would indicate that they were more able to conserve than Piaget concluded. 9a) Quantitative data was gathered by counting the number of errors made in each condition (2 question, 1 question and fixed array) and each task (mass, volume and number). b) Examples of quantitative data gathered were the number of errors made in conservation in each type of material (Plasticine, water and counters), and the mean number of errors made by each age group. 10a) The two other conditions were the two-question condition, where the children were asked whether the two items were the same before and after the transformation, and the fixed array condition where the children did not see the transformation take place. b) The one-question condition was to verify Samuel and Bryant s hypothesis that children s failure to succeed in Piaget s experiments was not because they could not conserve but because they were confused by being asked the same question twice, which led them to change their first answer because they thought it must be wrong. If the children showed improved success when only asked one question this would indicate that they were more able to conserve than Piaget concluded. 11. Two conclusions are that failure on the traditional two-question conservation task is at least partly due to the questioning technique rather than the fact that the children cannot conserve; and that children progress through stages of development which systematically affect their cognitive abilities.

3 12a) This age group was used because according to Piaget this is when they are progressing through the cognitive stages from being unable to conserve at all to being able to conserve in many circumstances. b) One difficulty that may arise when studying children is that they may become bored or distracted by the task and this may affect their answers rather than the IV itself. 13a) One piece of evidence supporting Piaget s theory of cognitive development is that the older children made fewer mistakes in conservation than the younger ones. This backs up Piaget s view that children s cognitive abilities systematically improve as they get older. b) One piece of evidence that challenges Piaget s theory of cognitive development is that although Piaget felt that children in the pre-operational stage cannot conserve, there were children in this age group in Samuel and Bryant s study who could successfully complete the task. 14a) The older the children were, the fewer mistakes they made in all conservation tasks. b) The number task produced the fewest errors, so the counters task was easier for the children to conserve successfully. The volume (water) task was the hardest, producing most errors. 15a) Reliability could be assessed by replicating the study with another group of children using the same conservation tasks of water, counters and Plasticine to see whether the results were consistent. b) Validity could be assessed by adding another question asking the children why they had given the answers they had. If their answer relates to knowing that the materials have stayed the same, the researcher would know that the conservation task was a valid measure of conservation. If they said they had just guessed, the researcher would know that the results did not truly reflect the children s conservation abilities. 16. This study is low in ecological validity because the tasks were performed out of any context. Normally the children would be making judgements in a situation where there may be other clues and motivations about any choice they might make between two items. It is also low in ecological validity because it was performed in a lab setting which would have put the children under a pressure that they would not experience usually and this may have caused them to alter their answers. 17. Two differences between the performances of 5 year olds and 8 year olds are that the 5 year olds made an average of eight errors in the standard two-question condition while the 8 year olds made only two; and that the 5 year olds made an average of seven errors on the one-question condition while the 8 year olds made only one. 18a) The ability to conserve was measured by showing the children an object, changing it in some way, and then asking the children questions to find out that it was actually fundamentally unchanged. The number of errors made by each child in each task was recorded.

4 b) One problem with measuring conservation in this way was that it required the children to sit through many trials which were essentially similar (each child did 12 tests) which may have bored the children and resulted in their guessing the answers. 19a) The experimental design in this study was both independent measures (the age groups) and repeated measures (the conservation tasks: volume, mass and number). b) One weakness is that the independent measures design element may have included groups of children who had had different experiences of conservation-type tasks so individual differences may have had an effect. 20a) Two criteria for selecting participants were that they included both boys and girls and that they were between the ages of 5 and 8. b) All the IVs were not manipulated because it was not possible to change the ages of the children, so this aspect of the study was a quasi-experiment. Section B 1. Piaget found that children under the age of about seven years could not conserve, supporting his theory. However, Piaget s methods were criticised because of the way he asked the questions. Donaldson argued that the use of two questions might confuse children (Piaget asked the same question twice: Are they the same? ). Children might think they had to give a different answer the second time. 2. The aim of the study was to investigate whether children under the age of 7 or 8 are able to understand conservation. 3. One hypothesis was that children asked one question in the conservation tasks would answer more questions correctly about whether the items were the same than children asked two questions. 4. This is a quasi-experiment because the IV of the children s age was naturally occurring, i.e. Samuel and Bryant could not allocate them into groups as they were already aged 5, 6, 7 or 8 years. 5. One strength of this is that it enables the conservation of children of varying ages to be compared all at once, rather than waiting for them to mature and test them at various stages of development. 6. One weakness is that, because this is a quasi-experiment, individual differences may have affected the participants ability to conserve more than their age itself boys and girls from Devon aged between 5 and 8.5 years.

5 8. The sample was gained by opportunity sampling, meaning that the children were available and convenient for Samuel and Bryant to use. 9. The sample was selected to cover children of various stages of development according to Piaget s theory, and to include both genders. 10. One strength is that this is a fairly large sample (252 children) which improves generalisability. 11. One weakness is that they were all from the same school and so may have had similar. experiences in this kind of conservation task, reducing representativeness. 12. This is a snapshot study because it takes just one set of data for each experiment, and captures the participants behaviour at one moment in time. It does not take account of development over time. In this study, it shows children s ability to conserve at that particular point and does not show how this ability changes over time. 13. One strength of snapshot studies is that they are quick to carry out, so Samuel and Bryant could gain all their data at once. This allowed them to draw rapid conclusions about the effect of age, task and the one-question paradigm on children s ability to conserve. 14. Snapshot studies do not allow the researcher to discover whether results are due to the development of the behaviour or to individual differences. In the Samuel and Bryant study the participants will have had different experiences and differing innate abilities, including what their families have taught them about conservation and the games they have played, for example. Therefore their inability to conserve may have been due to individual differences rather than to the IVs alone. 15. One ethical issues concerned informed consent the researchers probably asked parents or teachers for consent, rather than the children, which may have meant that the children would have preferred not to take part. Psychological harm some children might be distressed by being questioned on so many tasks by a stranger. They also might feel their IQ was being assessed and if they thought they failed they might feel lower self-esteem. 16. The procedure for this study involved splitting each age group into three conditions: the standard two-question condition, the one-question condition and the fixed array, control, condition. In the standard two-question condition, the child was asked whether the two items were the same before and after the transformation took place. In the one-question condition, the child was only asked once, after the transformation, but they saw the change take place. In the fixed array condition, the child only saw the objects after the transformation had occurred. There were three tasks; Plasticine (mass), water (volume) and counters (number). The items were changed so one lump of Plasticine was squashed, one

6 beaker of water was poured into a taller glass, and one row of counters was spread out. Each child had four trials of each, so went through 12 trials in total. 17. One change to the study could be to use a more diverse sample of children. The new sample could be of children the same age (i.e. 5 to 8) but they should be from all around the country. That way this would be a more diverse sample in terms of socio-economic class, educational background, regional background and so on. Another change to the study would be to let children play with the materials before the researchers asked them the questions. They could be asked while playing with, e.g. beakers of water in a wet play area in their primary school, or with counters, or with Plasticine/playdough. They could be allowed 5 minutes of play time (or active self-discovery) to help the children remind themselves of the materials and be mentally more primed for the task. Then the researchers could go through the normal conservation questions. 18. The first one probably wouldn t make much, if any, difference to the overall results, but it would mean that because the sample is more representative that we could be more sure that the results are generalisable to all children rather than just Devon children! I think that regardless of the condition (one-question, two-question or fixed array) the second one would increase the chances that children would get this right. However, it is still likely that correct answers would be higher in the one-question condition (supporting Samuel and Bryant) and increase with the age of the child (still supporting Piaget). 19. Quantitative data included the number of errors made by each age group, and the number of errors made in each condition. 20. One strength of quantitative data in this study is that it allows easy analysis and comparison, providing a numerical conclusion for whether the child s ability to conserve is affected by the way they are questioned during the task. 21. One weakness of quantitative data is that it does not provide insight into how exactly the errors occur, or what the child s faulty cognitive process is. It presents a rather superficial analysis because the detail describing the reasons why the child has answered in that way have not been addressed. 22. Samuel and Bryant found that older children made fewer errors on the conservation tasks for all materials. They also found that children were more able to conserve in the onequestion condition than the standard two-question condition. The most difficult condition was the fixed-array condition when they did not see the transformation. Finally, children were more able to conserve on the number task, they were next best on the mass task and finally the volume task. 23. The standardised procedure makes this a reliable study as it would be easy to replicate using the same materials and questioning techniques. The results are also in line with those of Piaget and Rose and Blank which increases the likelihood of consistency.

7 24. Control of extraneous variables included the use of the fixed array condition to ensure that the participant in the one-question condition were using the pre-transformation information available to them to make their judgement. This makes the study a more valid test of conservation as it eliminates guesswork. The age-matching also eliminates the possibility that children in one group may have been coincidentally older than the others, improving their grasp of conservation. 25. The tasks are quite similar to everyday life but the way the questions were asked (e.g. children might have felt anxious) means that they may not have behaved normally and therefore caution should be exercised when generalising the findings. It might be that the experimenters unwittingly provided other cues in the experiment about how to answer the questions. This could explain why the children found the fixed array control task more difficult. No information is given in the article about whether the experimenters (as distinct from the researchers who designed the experiment sometimes they are different) knew the aims of the experiment. Even if they didn t know the aims they may have unwittingly cued the children. It is difficult to know to what extent the children behaved as they would in everyday life. Unless they were asked the question, they might not think about these particular issues. Possibly, for conservation of liquid volume, for example, if they were playing with water in a natural setting, e.g. kitchen sink or bath, and then asked the conservation question, they may be more likely to get it right. This is because they would be more relaxed and would be more mentally prepared for the question if they had just been handling the material. The question might also make better sense to them. Section C 1. One assumption of the developmental approach is that as children grow and mature they change. Many developmental psychologists believe that these changes are not just a matter of quantity (e.g. just more logic or more language) but qualitative changes that, for example, their thinking actually changes from, for example, being able to think concretely to being able to think about abstract concepts. 2. The developmental approach would explain conservation in a Piagetian way. The ability to conserve or not conserve depends upon the maturity of the brain and how that limits or allows certain patterns of thinking. For example, a child still in the pre-operational thought stage, according to Piaget, would not be able to conserve because they would not be capable of the logical operations needed. For example, they are overly influenced by the appearance of objects, so that if one looks taller or longer, they think it must be bigger overall. In other words, they cannot see that the increase in height is compensated for by the decrease in width (in the case of the water beakers) so cannot realise that overall they are the same. Another logical operation that children under 7 lack is the ability to mentally rewind or reverse what they have just seen. Children over 7 in the concrete operational stage can mentally reverse the transformation and know that if the water was poured back into the original beaker then it can clearly be seen that it was of equal quantity.

8 3. One similarity between Samuel and Bryant s study and that of Bandura is that they both use a laboratory experiment procedure. This means that they are both highly controlled in terms of extraneous variables; for example, Samuel and Bryant control for age-related individual differences by age-matching the groups, while Bandura uses a matched pairs design to ensure that both his groups of participants are equal in natural aggression. This means that the cause and effect relationship it is possible to establish because of the experimental method is even stronger as extraneous variables are accounted for. One difference between Samuel and Bryant and Freud is that the latter only uses one child in his study, while Samuel and Bryant use a much larger sample of 252 children. This means that Samuel and Bryant s study is more representative because the children are more likely as a group to be typical of all children of those ages. Freud s single participant (Little Hans) is less likely to be representative as he is unlike any other child, so his phobias and fantasies are much more likely to unique to him. Therefore his results will be less generalisable as it cannot be assumed that other children would initiate the same findings about the genesis of phobias; this also makes the study less reliable. 4. One strength of the developmental approach is that it is possible to see how humans change with age. For example, in the Samuel and Bryant study, we can see that as children get older they become more logically and cognitively able. The evidence for this is that they are more likely to be able to conserve the older they get, regardless of the condition or the material. It is helpful to know how children s thought patterns change with age so that education programmes can be designed which best fit into this pattern and do not try to teach some concepts too early or too late. Another strength of the developmental approach is that it underlines how different humans are at different ages and stages and that the difference is not just of quantity (as mentioned in part a) but also of quality. Younger children cannot conserve partly because, as Piaget believed, they are not mentally mature enough and therefore lack logical operations and think in a different way. It is useful to know that there are qualitative differences because it reminds society that it is not appropriate to treat children just like little adults they need special consideration and understanding. One limitation of the developmental approach is that, although it should be concerned with lifespan development i.e. how we change throughout our whole lifetime then actually most of the research has been on children. For example, all the studies in the OCR specification in developmental psychology, like Samuel and Bryant, focus solely upon children and not on changes throughout adulthood. This means we do not understand enough about different stages of adulthood, about the changes and challenges that adults face as they progress through life and may not be best supported by society, the state and employers. Another limitation of the developmental approach is that for very clear conclusions to be drawn about how children change over time, the research should be longitudinal. In other words, in the case of Samuel and Bryant, they should start off with a sample of children who are aged 5, and test them every 6 months on the conservation tasks until they are aged 8.

9 This way, it would be possible to know when the changes take place in the children. Otherwise, it could be possible that the differences between the age groups in the design that Samuel and Bryant used might not be to do with age, but some other effect, e.g. a particular class teacher or new educational initiative that some children in one age group experienced and some didn t. Thus, one limitation of a lot of research in the developmental approach is that it doesn t really look at genuine development just differences between children of different ages.

10 BANDURA ET AL. Section A 1a) The two other IVS are the gender of the model and the gender of the participant. b) The effect of the behaviour of the model was that the children who saw the aggressive model imitated many of the model s physical and verbal behaviours, both aggressive and non-aggressive. Children who saw the non-aggressive model imitated very few behaviours. 2a) Two experimental groups were the children who saw the aggressive model and the children who saw the non-aggressive model. b) One finding from this study was that there was a tendency towards same-sex imitation for boys but not for girls. 3a) Children were matched in this study to ensure that the groups were equal in terms of preexisting aggression: this guarded against the possibility that one group was already more aggressive than the other regardless of the behaviour of the model they saw. b) Children were matched on pre-existing levels of aggression by asking the children s teachers to rate them on this factor, then matching them into triplets and assigning them at random to one of the three groups. 4a) One IV was the behaviour of the model (aggressive or non-aggressive) and one DV was the number of imitative aggressive behaviours shown in the third phase. b) The IV was manipulated by letting one group of children play in a room where an adult played aggressively with a Bobo doll, and another group of children played in a room where an adult model played in a subdued manner and ignored the Bobo doll. The control group had no exposure to any model. 5. In the second part the children underwent aggression arousal, where they were shown some attractive toys such as a fire engine and a baby crib, but after playing with them for a few minutes were told that those toys were for other children and that they must stop playing with them. 6a) This was necessary to observe the children playing with toys when they had the opportunity to copy the aggressive model s behaviour but could also choose not to. This would show whether they had learned the aggressive or non-aggressive behaviour from the model they had seen earlier. b) This observation was carried out by recording what the child was doing every 5 seconds for 20 minutes while they played with toys. This gave 240 observations in categories such as imitative aggression, partially imitative aggression and non-imitative aggression. 7a) The DV was the children s behaviour during free play, specifically whether they showed aggressive behaviours or not.

11 b) Imitative aggression responses including physical ones and verbal ones, such as pow, and non-imitative aggressive responses, i.e. ones they produced themselves but had not copied, such as aggressive gun play. 8a) They were from a university nursery school and were aged approx 3 5 years. b) One difficulty is that children are more suggestible than adults; they may be more prone to respond to researcher s cues because they are less sure of themselves. Therefore results may not be valid because they have simply fulfilled what they feel the researcher s expectations are. 9. Two findings from this study are that boys imitated more physical aggression than girls, but there was no gender difference in terms of verbal aggression; and that children in the nonaggression condition spent more time playing non-aggressively with dolls than children in the other groups. 10. Two ethical problems are that the children may have been caused upset in the second stage when they were denied the toys they wanted to play with; and that the children may have learned aggressive behaviour just from being in the study, so the research may have triggered anti-social behaviours that the child did not already have. 11. One piece of evidence that aggression can be learned through observation is that children who had seen the model behave aggressively imitated many of the model s behaviours, while children who had seen a non-aggressive model showed very few of these behaviours; 70% of them had zero scores for aggression. 12. This study is low in ecological validity because it would be unusual for an adult to be playing with toys in the presence of a child when they were not actually playing with the child, and this strange situation may have influenced the child s behaviour in itself; and also because aggressive behaviour would normally be defined as behaviour aimed at another person or animal. The Bobo doll was intended for that kind of behaviour and hitting it would not necessarily be termed aggressive in a real-life situation. 13a) The experimental design was independent measures because different groups of children saw each type of model. b) A weakness of this is that the groups may have had different characteristics such as previous experiences of aggressive play, and that this affected the results more than the behaviour of the model. 14a) Aggression was measured by watching the children play freely and coding their behaviours every 5 seconds for 20 minutes for imitative aggression, partially imitative aggression and non-imitative aggression. b) One problem with measuring aggression in this way is that behaviours may have occurred between the observation points which were not recorded, making the results less valid.

12 15a) The control group had no exposure to a model. b) A control group was necessary to make a comparison with both the experimental groups; otherwise it may have been that exposure to any model affected subsequent behaviour. 16a) In the second part the children underwent aggression arousal, where they were shown some attractive toys such as a fire engine and a baby crib, but after playing with them for a few minutes were told that those toys were for other children and that they must stop playing with them. b) This was necessary because the researchers felt that observing aggressive behaviour may reduce the probability of behaving aggressively, or observing non-aggressive behaviour may inhibit aggression, so this second phase created a level playing field for all participants. 17a) Reliability was assessed by having a second observer watch the child playing for some of the time. b) One conclusion is that people will produce new behaviours that they have observed and generalise these to other situations. 18a) One way in which the sample is representative is that they included an equal number of boys and girls so would be representative of both genders in the target population. b) One way in which they were unrepresentative is that they all attended a university nursery, so were likely to come from well-educated families; this may have affected their previous exposure to and understanding of aggressive behaviour in a way which is not typical of all families. 19a) This age group was used in this study because at this age (3 5 years) children are learning a great deal and trying out novel behaviours, and may be particularly susceptible to the effects of role models. This made them appropriate for identifying the effect of observing other people s behaviours. b) The findings may have been different for adults because they have an additional layer of moral development and understanding of the consequences of their actions, so they may not have imitated the model because they have probably been taught that aggression is wrong over a longer period. 20a) Two examples of quantitative data are the number of imitative aggressive behaviours shown in the third phase, and the number of non-imitative aggressive responses shown. b) One strength is that this numerical data is easy to analyse and represent on a graph, clearly showing conclusions about whether the group of children who had seen the aggressive model had behaved differently from those who had seen the non-aggressive model. Section B

13 1. Behaviourists suggested that rewards have to be experience directly (i.e. you receive the reward yourself. Albert Bandura suggested that learning can occur when rewards are experienced indirectly. This is called social learning because it involves watching other people (social activity). This was supported by research. For example studies have shown that children imitate a behaviour in the immediate environment where they see it happening. For example, if a child sees someone being aggressive to a particular toy then the child will also behave aggressively towards that toy. However a more crucial test of imitative (social) learning is to see whether a child will generalise the imitative response patterns to new settings when the model is absent. 2. The aim of the study was to see if learning that took place in one situation would be generalised to other situations. 3. One hypothesis was that children seeing an aggressive model would reproduce aggressive acts similar to their models, while that would not be true of children seeing a non-aggressive model or no model. 4. This is a laboratory experiment because it took place in a setting that had been created for the purposes of the research; it was not in a real-world environment such as the child s own nursery. It has an IV (the type of model seen) and a DV (the child s behaviour). 5. A strength of this is that the situation was tightly controlled, e.g. the behaviour of the models, and cause and effect can be inferred due to manipulation of the IV, so it is possible to assume that the child s behaviour in phase 3 was due to the behaviour the model had shown. 6. A weakness is that the situation was not very realistic for the child, for example being in the presence of an unknown adult playing with toys, so the results may not hold true for what a child would actually do in a similar learning opportunity in real life. 7. The sample was 36 boys and 36 girls from a university nursery school in America, with a mean age of 52 months. 8. Matching was necessary in this study to ensure that one group of children was not naturally more aggressive than the other, as this would have affected the results as well as the influence of the model s behaviour. 9. Children were matched according to their nursery teacher s reports of their usual levels of aggression, so that each pair of children with a similar aggression level were split, with one in each group. 10. One strength of using this sample is that they are unlikely at their age to guess the purpose of the study and alter their behaviour accordingly; so they would not know that they were expected to copy the aggressive model s behaviour. 11. One weakness is that because they were all from a university nursery, they were likely to come from a middle-class, well-educated background. Middle-class children may be less

14 aggressive so we cannot generalise to all American children children who are exposed to more violence might react differently. Finally, the children were all children of parents who had jobs in a high status and prestigious university. This might make them more obedient and prone to copying adults than other children who might be more encouraged to argue back or ignore adult behaviour. 12. This is a snapshot study because it takes just one set of data for each experiment, and captures the participants behaviour at one moment in time. It does not take account of development over time. In this study, it shows people s ability to succeed in the Eyes Task and does not take account of how those abilities may change over time. 13. One strength of snapshot studies is that they are quick to carry out, so Bandura could gain all his data at once. This allowed him to draw rapid conclusions about the effect of a model s behaviour on children s subsequent behaviour, and whether they would generalise that behaviour to a new setting. 14. Snapshot studies do not allow the researcher to discover whether results are due to the development of the behaviour or to individual differences. In the Bandura study the participants will have had different experiences and differing innate tendencies, meaning that their likelihood of copying aggressive behaviour varies according to their personality and family background. 15. One issue is that it isn t ethically acceptable to try to teach children to become more aggressive; the study may have affected their behaviour negatively in the long term. Secondly, it is not acceptable to provoke them. The children may have been alarmed watching the model behave aggressively towards the Bobo doll. 16. Observation was used in the third phase of this study when the child was given the opportunity to play with toys for 20 minutes. The observers recorded what the child was doing every 5 seconds, giving 240 observations, in categories such as imitative aggressive responses and partially imitative responses. 17. There were two experimental groups and one control group. One experimental group saw an aggressive model, and the other saw a non-aggressive model. The control group saw no model. The children were matched on levels of pre-existing aggression. In phase 1, they were in the presence of a model who either played aggressively with a blow-up Bobo doll, or played quietly in the corner. In phase 2, the child was provoked by being shown some attractive toys but not allowed to play with them. In the third phase, the child was given the opportunity to play with a variety of toys while an observer watched through a one-way mirror. Then observers recorded what the child was doing every 5 seconds, giving 240 observations, in categories such as imitative aggressive responses and partially imitative responses. 18. One change to Bandura would be to show them videos of a model hitting a Bobo doll. The whole procedure could be identical except for this fact.

15 Another change could be to have older children as the sample. Again, the procedure could be basically the same as the original study, except the children could be aged 5 8 (i.e. lower primary school age, rather than pre-school). The toys and props could probably remain more or less the same, though it might be a good idea to introduce one or two older toys. 19. The video would be an interesting change because a lot of aggression children see is on the TV and it would be useful to see if children imitate behaviour seen on TV as well as behaviour in real life. I think this would show similar results overall in terms of imitating specific acts and would also show an increase in general aggression. However, I do not think the differences would be so great between the two groups. This is because the impact of seeing somebody do something on screen is less than seeing someone do the same thing in real life. I think the results of the second change would be different in that there would be less imitation. The children would be less likely to copy the models because they are more capable of thinking logically and might ask themselves Do I want to hit the Bobo doll? and their characters at this age are already much more formed and less prone to being influenced. Therefore, I think the difference between the two groups will decrease, though there will still be some imitation of aggression. 20. Qualitative data included descriptions of the things children said, possibly in imitation of the model such as He keeps coming back for more, and descriptions of their behaviour such as slaps the doll. 21. A strength of qualitative data is that it gives clear detailed descriptions of exactly what the child was doing; this detail would not be revealed by quantitative data. This allows us to see the extent to which the child was copying what the model had done. 22. A weakness is that it is hard to measure and analyse, so the descriptions of the child s actions and utterances may have been hard to code into categories for comparison. 23. The findings of the study were that children imitated the models they saw in terms of specific acts and general levels of behaviour. There was some evidence of a same-sex effect for boys but not girls (ie being more likely to copy the behaviour of a model of the same sex), and boys imitated more physical aggression than girls although there was no difference in terms of verbal aggression. Children in the aggressive condition imitated many of the model s physical and verbal aggressive and non-aggressive behaviours. However, the children who saw a non-aggressive model did not display such behaviours. 24. The standardised procedure here including the behaviour checklist during the observation allows for replicability. The measurement of the behaviours representing the DV was clear and consistent although the use of a model as an observer may have introduced an element of bias. Some of the time two observers were used which allows for inter-rater reliability. Another sample may produce a different set of results, for example if they came from a different culture where aggressive behaviour was less acceptable.

16 25. This study aimed to test whether children would copy aggressive behaviour and this would seem to address this issue in a valid way, particularly with the control in place for natural level of aggression which implies that any aggression seen would be the result of learning by imitation. However, there is the possibility that the children could not think of any other way of playing with the toy, so a more valid way of testing whether they chose to copy the aggressive behaviours may have been to use a toy where there were more options for different types of play. 26. People may well not do the same things to a real person that they would to a doll, which means that these findings can t be generalised to other situations though Bandura tried the same study using a film where a woman beat a live clown; when the children went into a room with a live clown, they punched, kicked and hit him with hammers just as they had seen in the film. The results of this study may not be very useful in understanding long-term aggression (as the children s aggression was only measured very soon after exposure to the model), though if a child is continually exposed to such models then it might explain longterm behaviours. Section C 1. One assumption of the developmental approach is that as children grow and mature they change. Many developmental psychologists believe that these changes are not just a matter of quantity (e.g. just more logic or more language) but qualitative changes that, for example, their thinking actually changes from, for example, being able to think concretely to being able to think about abstract concepts. 2. The developmental approach could explain aggression by focusing on the way children learn from other people. During children s development, they acquire particular behaviours by watching other people and imitating them, and then extending that behaviour into other contexts and situations. This is known as Social Learning Theory and is a key part of developmental psychology which argues that human behaviour is an interaction between cognitive, behavioural and environmental influences. In this case, Bandura has shown that aggression can be learned by watching other people behave aggressively and then transferring that learning to other contexts. 3. One similarity between Bandura and Samuel and Bryant is that both studies used an opportunity sample, meaning that they used children who were available to them conveniently: Samuel and Bryant children at one school in Devon, and Bandura children at a university nursery. The fact that each sample came from one place makes them less representative of the whole population because they will have had similar experiences and somewhat similar backgrounds. For Samuel and Bryant this may mean that all the children in their sample might have had particular experiences with conservation-type tasks, and all the children in Bandura s sample may have had a particular attitude to aggressive behaviour or certain types of toys. In both cases this would affect the generalisability of the results.

17 One difference between Bandura and Freud is that Bandura used a laboratory environment for his experimental procedure while Freud used a case study method based on the home environment of his participant. Bandura s study could therefore be said to lack ecological validity because the setting was artificial so the children may not behave as they normally would. However, the toys and the task (simply being left to play) was ecologically valid because this is what the children would do in their normal lives. Freud s study, on the other hand, was ecologically valid because Little Hans was in his normal home environment so his behaviour would not have changed due to the knowledge that he was involved in research. 4. One strength of the developmental approach is that it is possible to see how factors influence children and how it might affect them in growing up and possibly later in life. For example, in Bandura, we can see that role models are a really important influence on children and their behaviour. Another strength of the developmental approach is that it is really useful. Developmental psychology suggests lots of applications that can help society. For example, from Bandura we know of the importance of role models and so society should take some care in the types of role behaviour children are exposed to. This means that TV programmes that involve antisocial behaviour should not be on before 9pm so that children do not imitate negative behaviours. Also, parents need to be mindful of what roles they are setting for their children. One weakness of the developmental approach is that for the research to be genuinely developmental (looking at how humans develop) it should use a longitudinal design but much developmental research just uses a snapshot design. For example, in Bandura, one weakness is that we only know how the children behaved minutes after the exposure to the model. We do not know if role models have a longer term influence of the children s behaviour or not. Ideally, they should be followed up days, weeks and possibly months later to see how long the effect of a role model might last. This means that the results are not as useful as they might at first appear. Another weakness of the developmental approach is that, inevitably, it uses children as participants and this means that ethical issues are often raised. This is because children are much more sensitive and susceptible to harm precisely because they are so young. In Bandura ethical issues are raised because the children were exposed to aggression which may have been frightening (i.e. caused some harm) as well as the children becoming more aggressive themselves. Although the aggression was relatively mild, it might have appeared to endorse violence. This is ethically questionable.

18 FREUD Section A 1a) The phallic stage is important because the child s focus in on his genitals, and during this phase he goes through the Oedipus complex where he desires his mother and hates his father, which is resolved by his eventually identifying with his father and his father s behaviours. b) One example of Hans behaviour which showed he was in this stage of development is that he hit his father and wished that he would be away permanently, probably so that he could have his mother s undivided company. 2. One strength of the way data was gathered was that because it was collected by his father, Hans was more likely to say what he really thought and felt than he would if he was telling an unknown researcher. Therefore a more valid, detailed picture could be obtained. One weakness was that because it was reaching Freud second-hand through Hans father there was more opportunity for the information to be edited and abridged, meaning that Freud would have only obtained a partial account of what Hans was saying, doing and feeling. 3a) Two features of the Oedipus complex are feeling desire for the mother and hatred towards the father. b) One piece of evidence supporting this is he hit his father and wished that he would be away permanently, probably so that he could have his mother s undivided company. 4a) Hans had sexual fantasies about his mother but felt anxious as a result, for example because she had threatened to cut off his penis if he touched it. b) He felt animosity towards his sister because she had taken some of his mother s attention away from him. Because of this he wished his mother would let Hanna go when she was in the bath so that she would drown. 5a) One of Hans dreams was about giraffes. He dreamed that there was a big giraffe which called out, and a crumpled one which Hans took away and sat down on. b) Freud s explanation of this was that the big giraffe was Hans father, who called out (told him not to) when Hans tried to come into their bed. The crumpled giraffe was his mother s sexual organ. 6a) One event that may have triggered Hans phobia of horses and carts was that he had seen a horse pulling a bus fall down and kick its legs about, which terrified Hans because he thought the horse was dead.

19 b) This may have been linked to his unconscious anxieties because the heavily laden cart represented pregnancy, and it falling down was like giving birth. This was linked to Hans ambivalent feelings towards his sister. 7a) This sample (Hans) was chosen because Hans father was a fan of Freud s and offered to put his ideas into practice with his own son. b) This sample is unrepresentative because as it only consists of one child, the dreams, phobias and fantasies will be completely unique to him and unlikely to be relevant for any other child s experiences. 8. Two conclusions are that Freud s ideas about sexuality are supported, for example his interest in his widdler and his Oedipus complex; and that phobias are the conscious expression of repressed anxieties. 9a) One of Hans phobias was of horses and that a white horse would bite him. b) Freud s interpretation of this was that horses were symbolic of Hans father because the black around the horse s mouths and their blinkers were like Hans father s moustache and glasses, and Hans was afraid of his father because he was so fond of his mother. 10. Horses were symbolic of Hans father because the black around the horse s mouths and their blinkers were like Hans father s moustache and glasses, and Hans was afraid of his father because he was so fond of his mother. 11a) Data was collected by Hans father writing down all the things that Hans did, said, dreamed and was afraid of, and posting them to Freud for his comments. b) Because it was reaching Freud second-hand through Hans father there was more opportunity for the information to be edited and abridged, meaning that Freud would have only obtained a partial account of what Hans was saying, doing and feeling. This would have lowered the validity of the data. 12a) In Hans dream of giraffes, he dreamed that there was a big giraffe which called out, and a crumpled one which Hans took away and sat down on. b) One problem with the way this was interpreted was that there is no evidence or previous precedent to support this being the correct interpretation, so the dream may have reflected other thoughts or events, or none at all. 13. Freud proposed that mental illness can be explained in terms of ego defence mechanisms and unconscious thoughts may be expressed as phobias if these ego defence mechanisms are not fully effective. Evidence to support this from the study of Little Hans is that he developed the phobia of horses to protect him from realising that he felt animosity towards his father. 14a) He felt animosity towards his sister because she had taken some of his mother s attention away from him.

20 b) Because of this he wished his mother would let Hanna go when she was in the bath so that she would drown. 15a) Hans was playing with his imaginary children and said that boys couldn t have children; he said he had been their mother but was now their father, and Hans father was their grandfather. b) This helped him pass through the Oedipus complex because he had worked out a solution where his father was still part of the family and both were married to Hans mother, so Hans was free to identify with his father and develop normal behaviours. 16a) This is an example of a leading question, where Hans is being prompted to answer in a certain way. b) Hans may have wished to get into bed with his mother because he was going through the Oedipus complex in the phallic stage of psychosexual development. 17. One ethical problem of dealing with child participants is that they are especially suggestible, so they may respond to the researcher s expectations and produce answers they think are in line with this; in this study Hans may have made up some dreams because he knew it pleased his father. Another ethical problem is that Hans was not asked for, or able to give, informed consent to take part in this study due to his lack of understanding of what was happening, but being in this study may have been not what he wanted had he been able to choose. 18a) One piece of evidence is that he had an interest in other girls and wanted to kiss them, which was taken as evidence that he felt sexual desire for his mother. b) She refused to touch his penis in the bath. 19. Two methods used to collect data were that Hans father asked Hans about his dreams and wrote down all that he said; and that he watched his behaviour such as kicking about when urinating or defecating. 20a) Hans was chosen because his father was an ardent follower of Freud and offered to put his theories and ideas into practice with his own child. b) One limitation of using Hans is that because his father was a fan of Freud s he was probably hoping to find that he agreed with Freud s ideas and that his theories would be proved right. This may have meant that he was subject to researcher bias and was not objective about the data he collected. Section B 1. Freud s previous research took the form of development of theories regarding children s stages of psychosexual development. He posited the Oedipus complex, and the idea that