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The purpose of the master classes is to develop students understanding of certain evaluation issues that effect psychology. Some of the evaluation issues are issues/debates that are part of A2 whereas some of the issues are things that are not on A2 syllabus but nevertheless are important in AS psychology and beyond. The purpose of the master classes is to improve AO2 skills that can be used in all their AS units and will provide them with excellent evaluation skills for going on to A2. |
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Cause and effect means establishing that one variable has caused a change in the other variable for example has an increase in stress levels caused illness. It is important to establish cause and effect, so that an undesirable effect can be changed or eliminated i.e. reducing illness by decreasing levels of stress.
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Cultural bias in psychology- There is a tendency for psychology to be culturally biased. This means ignoring the differences between cultures and imposing understanding based on the study of one culture to other cultures. |
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| Reductionism-This is explaining complex behaviour in terms of simple principles. These principles can be biological i.e. in terms of brain function or psychological i.e. conditioning or cognitive functioning. Reductionists believe that all human behaviour can be explained in terms of one of the simple principles. Reductionism usually refers to a theory or explanation. However it can refer to research which will be discussed later. |
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| One of the biggest issues with psychological research is being able to generalise the findings of the studies to the general population. If the sample is unrepresentative then often the findings can not be generalised. |
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| All psychological research should be useful. This means that the research should have some real life applications and these applications should work. For example Stress research is very useful because stress costs UK companies huge amounts of money a year so by understanding stress we can try to reduce its impact. |
All materials are provided as Word documents to allow distribution and printing. |
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