Gender and Relationships revision

We will conclude our in-class revision of Gender and Relationships on Friday 4th May, and will be doing a Unit 3 mock paper in our double on Friday 11th May.

Here is the list of studies and theories for Gender which we made in our lesson last Friday - I will add a similar document for Relationships here on Monday.

Here is the list of past Unit 3 questions. You should by now have given me Q4 from January 2012, and I've set Q9 from January 2012 and Q5 from January 2012 for next Thursday. Some of you have other, very pressing, priorities, but remember that the more essays you write (I suggest without access to note, by hand, and in 30 minutes) the easier it will be in the real thing.

Here is the edited specification in case you don't have that - everything you need to know (apart from your AS Research Methods of course).

Here is a selection of sample essays written by a psychology teacher friend of mine, along with an AQA exemplar.

Wilcoxon's T test

The last of our four statistical tests, the Wilcoxon T test, is used for repeated measures and matched pairs designs. It is used when the hypothesis predicts a difference between two sets of data and when the data are ordinal or interval.

For Wilcoxon, the observed value must be less than or equal to the critical value for significance to be shown. This is the same procedure as the Mann-Whitney test. For X-squared and Spearman's rank, the observed value must be greater than or equal to the critical value for significance. I think that it is likely that you would be told this information as part of an exam question, but as this is always a dangerous thing to assume it is worth knowing the difference - especially as looking up critical values in a table has been a fairly common task in this question in recent years.

The step-by-step worksheet for Wilcoxon's test is here and the second worksheet is here. The 1-slide powerpoint explaining when to use Wilcoxon is here.

We also attempted an entire RM question from June 2010 which is here. The mark scheme is here.

I also handed out a summary sheet for the four tests now we have finished them all, and this is here.

Lots and lots of statistics

Today we practised two more statistical tests - Chi squared and Mann-Whitney.

The chi-squared test is used when the hypothesis predicts a difference or an association between two conditions, when the data is nominal (categoric) and when the categories used are independent of each other.

The two chi-squared worksheets are here and here. See me if you need the past paper question and mark scheme on this topic as it's old style copy and paste ie not electronic (likewise for the answer sheet to the worksheets).

The Mann-Whitney test is used for independent groups designs. The data needs to be ordinal or interval or ratio and the hypothesis needs to predict a difference between two sets of data.

The step-by-step worksheet for Mann-Whitney is here and the second example sheet is here.

I also briefly talked about types of data and this handout should clarify matters.

The Specification

Here is an edited version of the whole specification - for you to 'traffic-light' by our next lesson:AQA a Psychology Spec Cheney 2012

Exceptional Experiences

The final section of the anomalistic specification is:

"Psychological research into and explanations for psychic healing, near death and out of body experiences, and psychic mediumship."

'Explanations for...' can of course include the possibility that these things are real, but it seems more likely (to most psychologists) that they are instead powerfully real 'experiences' which have rational, scientific explanations.

There aren't many different questions that can be asked on these, but you could be required to focus either on 'explanations for' or 'research into' these experiences. You therefore need one or two explanations in reasonable depth, and at least one, preferably two studies for each that you can describe and evaluate. Of course, if the question is on explanations, studies can form part of the evaluation.
Exceptional Experiences 2