In this unit we will study
five schools of psychology – behaviourist, psychoanalytical, biological,
cognitive and humanistic. All five schools have different ideas and
explanations about human behaviour, and they also have different ideas about
what constitutes evidence to support a theory or explanation.
Later in the unit, we will
study research methods – techniques used by psychologists to attempt to
gather evidence that they feel will support their theory.
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What type of evidence
might psychologists accept as valid? This very much depends on the approach
taken by the psychologist. For example, a client’s
account of their early childhood and their feelings of abandonment when a
younger sibling was born may be a valid source of evidence to a
psychoanalytical psychologist, but what would a behaviourist say? |
Psychological evidence falls
into four main categories:
q
Behaviour
q
Inner Experiences
q
Material
q
Symbolic
Can you think of examples
for each of these? Some examples have been given below to help – what type of
data are these?
q
Recording variations in
students’ blood sugar levels over the course of a day.
q
A woman’s account of a
childhood fear of dogs.
q
The number of times in
an hour an infant displays distress, e.g. crying, hitting out.
q
A child’s drawing of
their family which showed Mum and the children on one side, and Daddy in a box
on the other side.
Working in groups, discuss
advantages and disadvantages for each type of data. How might you go about
gathering the different types of data, and what problems might you encounter in
doing this?