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Class notes for all Issues and Debates in AQA Psychology A Level. Includes both content and evaluation.
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— Issues and debates8.1 GENDER BIAS
Heading Notes
Universality and - Psychology claims universality - that conclusions drawn can be applied to
everyone, regardless of time or culture
bias
- However psychologists have beliefs and values that can lead to some form
of bias in their work (even unintentionally)
Androcentrism = Psychology is mostly male dominated
- If our understanding of what’s ‘normal’ is drawn from an all male
research, then any behaviour deviating from this may be judged as
abnormal
- Leads to female behaviour being misunderstood or pathologized (written
off as a mental disorder)
- Can lead to alpha or beta bias
Alpha bias = When the differences between men and women are shown and may be
exaggerated - either to heighten the value of women or devalue them
- Differences are shown as being real, fixed and inevitable
- E.g. Freud argued that girls do not suffer the same oedipal conflict as boys
(don’t identify with their mothers as much as boys do with their dads) so
they develop weaker superegos - without doing any research on girls
Beta bias = When the differences between men and women are ignored or minimised -
theories assume that the findings from males can apply equally to females
Evaluation + Feminist psychology
→ Worrell and Remer (1992) have put forward a number of criteria
that should be adhered to in order to avoid gender bias in research -
→ Women (and people in general) should be studied in meaningful
real life contexts rather than being the objects of study; diversity
within groups of women should be looked at rather than
comparisons between men and women; use a variety of research
methods to collate qualitative data, not just quantitative
- Implications of gender bias
→ Can create misleading ideas about female behaviour which could
validate discriminatory practices - could provide ‘scientific
justification’ to deny women opportunities in the
workplace/society
→ Tavris (1993) - when men set the standard of normalcy, then it
becomes normal for women to feel abnormal
→ More than a methodological problem - could have an effect on the
lives of real women (women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with
depression)
, - Sexism within the research process
→ As there are not many women in senior research levels, it means
that female concerns may not be reflected
→ Male researchers are more likely to have their research published,
and studies that find a gender difference are more likely to appear
in journals
→ Lab experiments may disadvantage women - Nicolson (1995):
female participants are in an unbalanced relationship with a male
researcher who can label them unreasonable/ unable to finish tasks
- Research challenging bias may not be published
→ Meta-analysis of 1,000 articles about gender bias found that these
articles had less funding behind them no matter who was writing
the article (and if they did, then they were published in less
prestigious journals)
→ Suggests that gender bias in research may not be taken as seriously
as other forms of bias
- Gender bias can also devalue men
→ Some research views women as more relational and caring (leads
into biased ideas about attachment)
→ Women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and given
treatment than males - this may be because women are more likely
to suffer from depression, but it could be that the diagnostic system
is biased towards finding depression amongst women
→ The expectation for males to be able to ‘pull themselves together’
and hide their emotions is an issue with the diagnostic systems
8.2 CULTURE BIAS
Heading Notes
Basics = interpreting and judging behaviour and psychological characteristics of one
culture by holding them to the standards of your own
- Could take two forms: either through theories developed in one culture
which are applied inappropriately to all others, or through biased research
methods which only use participants which are not representative of all
cultures
- Universality is also claimed in terms of cultures despite the stats below -
could lead to labelling any non-American culture as abnormal or inferior
- 1992 - 64% of word’s psychology researchers were American; 2010 - 68%
of research participants were from USA, and 96% from industrialised
nations; psychology seems to mainly be the study of white American males
Henrich WEIRD people set the standards:
- Westernised, Educated people from Industrialised, Rich Democracies
- If the norm for a behaviour is set by WEIRD people, then the behaviour
from non-Western, less educated, agricultural and poorer cultures may be
seen as abnormal or inferior
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