Evaluating the cross cultural studies:

Only way to identify differences and similarities between differing cultures, contributes
towards nature vs nurture debate.
Identify different approaches and issues in different cultures, hence transfer technique
between different cultures ~ Diagnosis of DSM
Same methodology, test used see same concept, different cultures. May be more
appropriate for some cultures than in other cultures e.g. strange situation.
Ethnocentric bias, as subjective using their own schemata e.g. German children
insecurely attached as their children encouraged to be independent not due to worse
way of forming attachment with child.
Culture bias: People from one culture make assumptions about behaviour of those another
culture based on own cultures norms and practices.
Reduce bias:
- Taking into account cultural customs. E.g. Japanese culture encourage children be
dependent on caregiver, hence Miyake found more insecure resistant attached.
- Ethnographical fieldwork, immerse themselves into diff culture. E.g. Malinoski.
- Take into account different cultures beliefs e.g. Hearing voices.
- Acknowledge own culture background affect interpretation of data.
- Use emic approach.
Etic: Used to see similarities and differences between cultures i.e. by studying culture as
outsider, by using tools + techniques which developed in our own culture e.g. replicating
strange situation.
Emic: Focusing on an individual culture from the perspective of an insider. E.g. Malinowski.
Social Control evaluation:
Drug Therapy:
Ethical:
o Questionable whether treatment most effective? Could be easy way for GP to help
patient.
o Development drug by animal is unethical itself
o Drug addicts who has the right to stop them taking these harmful drugs?
o Only sedate person rather than help person.
o Not deal with underlying causes it just supresses symptoms
o Given drugs to live and behave by societys rules and expectations rather than treat
their illness.
Practical
o May forget to take drug or choose not to due to side effects.
o Effectiveness of drug wears off and person may relapse
o Often costly and time consuming
o Body becomes immune to drug hence over time change to more powerful drug.
Token Economy:
Ethical
o Who does it benefit? Staff or Patient? May benefit staff more than patient as easy
way out for staff.
o Infringe on rights of pps as required to change behaviour (goes against their will) for
rewards
o Ethical if it targets behaviour that benefits society.
o Only serves to control behaviour not change it.
o Only changes behaviour short run
o Learnt behaviour not adaptable to outside world as often delays in real life tokens.

 Practical
o Not generalizable to outside world.
o Staff must be trained therefore costly
o Difficult implementing reward which every pps wants, as rewards have to be
something they desire or else there is no motivation to show desired behaviour and
effectiveness is reduced.
Classical Conditioned:
Ethical
o Lot of pressure put on client by therapist especially aversion therapy.
o Aversion therapy generally ethically strong as it helps overcome undesirable
behaviour such as addictions.
o Unpleasant experience for patient e.g. homosexuals sometimes forced to go
through electrotherapy to cure themselves.
o Pps some control over therapy unlike flooding as they choose hierarchy for fears.
o Classical condition principles used for advertisements to manipulate consumers.
Practical
o Pps have choice and must be willing to take part
o Very little equipment cost is therefore low.
o Careful not to condition response onto other objected hence make sure patient
doesnt generalise condition e.g. alcohol causes sick feeling, need to prevent this
response for all liquids.
o Relationship with therapist must be built
o Client need to be able to transfer all they have learnt to different situations.
Methodology:
Laboratory (Milgram)
Field (Hofling)
Observations Natural (Robertson) and Structured (Ainsworth)
Natural (Charlton)
Aim: To investigate the effects of TV on childrens behaviour.
Procedure: They video-recorded + observed childrens behaviour in playground of two schools
before the introduction of TV into St Helena and five years after the introduction. Behaviour
was either categorised as prosocial or antisocial, and results were tallied. Questionnaires given
to teachers and parents concerning the childrens behaviour to rate their play/behaviour both
before and after TV was introduced. Content analysis of the television programmes watched by
children, particularly violent content was carried out. Used number of different observers in
order to establish inter-rater reliability. Only behaviour that was agreed on was included in
results. They then compared behaviour before and after introduction of TV. Natural experiment
as TV was introduced naturally/ not manipulated/ because researchers used the planned
introduction of satellite TV to the island.
Results: there was no increase in aggressive behaviour after the introduction of TV. In fact,
children showed more prosocial behaviour.
Evaluation:
V: Natural experiments have greater realism because the IV is not directly manipulated in
this case the introduction of TV
V: Real life in the field so childrens playing should be natural
R: The findings may not be generalisable to other places where a special close knit culture
did not occur
R: Other studies (Williams, 1981) have shown the opposite effects of media violence than
Charlton

 V: The children were not exposed to all mainland programmes, notably violent childrens
viewing
R: Extraneous variables such as home life we not controlled so the study would be difficult
to replicate
R: Researchers videoed the behaviour of the children so it could be objectively coded
R: Inter-rater reliability was established as two researchers independently coded and
scored the footage
The parents gave informed consent for themselves and children to be included in the study.
The video cameras placed in the playground could be regarded as an invasion of privacy.
The introduction of TV was naturally occurring so there could be no ethical implications with
introducing potentially violent TV.
The study does not support the role of the watershed directly and censorship may be
pointless according to these findings.
The study supports the role of the family/social network and community to buffer the effects
of TV violence.
Content Analysis (Cumberbath and Guantlett)
Turning qualitative data into quantitative data often through tallying how many times
certain theme occurs within a source e.g. newspaper articles.
Source maybe coded or broken down into manageable categories e.g. sentences or
phrases.
Researcher then analysis the data and draws conclusions.
E.g. Researcher may tally how often negative/positive comment appear within two
newspapers about day-care, and draw conclusions about how day-care is portrayed in
media.
Evaluation of Content Analysis:
- Collect data from source already exists, few ethical issues involved.
- Reliability can be tested for, as others can repeat the content analysis using the same
themes and categories.
- Can be subjective, as a researcher has to interpret the data to find the themes.
- Limited to the number of resources available.
Cumberbath and Guantlett:
This was a content analysis commissioned by Ofcom.
Aim: Wanted to see how often smoking, alcohol and drug abuse were featured in television
programmes watched by 10 to 15 year olds, and how they were handled.
Procedure: TV programmes between August and October 2004 were sampled, with 256
programmes in all. Over 70% were soap operas, and all programmes were broadcast before
the 9pm watershed.
Visual presentations and references to smoking, alcohol and drugs were noted.
Results: Was found that alcohol featured the most, with about 12 incidences per hour. There
was much less reference to drugs or smoking, but only 4% of programmes featured none of
these three. It was noted that major characters could be seen drinking and smoking, and large
story arcs centred on drug abuse. But it was praised that drugs especially were always seen in
a negative light. Smoking and alcohol were seen in either a negative or neutral light, but
nothing was given to show drugs in a positive aspect. Being a content analysis, these results
are the conclusions.
Questionnaire (Mumford and Whitehouse)
Written questions find peoples opinion.
Collect data from a lot of people as everyone is asked same questions.

 Sent via post, filled in on the internet, given face to face or left in public place for people to
pick up and fill.
Questions either closed or open. Closed questions involve set of multiple choice
questions. Open questions as ppl about what they think about certain topic, pps elaborate
and comment on their answer to find thoughts/opinion of the person.
Closed questions obtain quantitative data, whereas open gets qualitative.
Evaluation of Questionnaire:
- Gathered from large sample, more representative
- Closed questions statistically analysed, easy to compare between data, everyone gives
possible same answers amongst questions. Easy to replicate study with closed
questions, hence test reliability.
- However, closed question force respondent to pick an option, which doesnt reflect their
real opinion hence reduce validity.
- Open questions collect rich, in-depth data.
- However, open questions are subject to interpretation, pps may misunderstand questions
as may interpret question differently. Also people may give socially desirable answers
Contribution to society:
Social: Blind Obedience:
Idea that our social system leads to obedience. Milgram suggested that people operate in
two ways when put into certain social situations; either autonomously or agentically. The
Autonomous state is when people are in control of their actions and take responsibility for
the consequence of their actions. The Agentic state is when people perceive themselves as
being under the control of others; they act as agents of others and believe they dont need to
take responsibility for the consequence of their actions. In some circumstances people have
to do things that go against their own self-conscious, this is known as moral strain. Acting
agentically can be learnt from parents and schools. Milgram argued that our tendency to
obey authority is an evolutionary mechanism which helps to maintain a stable society.
Evaluation:

This theory helps to explain different levels of obedience found in the variation studies
e.g. location change found a 40% decrease of obedience as pps moved away from
being in an Agentic state.

Idea of moral strain supports Milgrams findings that minority of pps showed signs of
stress while deciding to obey but not after the decision was made.

It does not explain individual differences, why some people obey and why others dont.

Disobedience of some can be explained by their personality (charismatic leadership)

this therefore suggests that the cause of obedience is much more complex than what
the agency theory states.

Milgrams study lacks ecological validity as the task of giving electrical shocks is not
encountered in everyday life.

Contribution to society: The Agency theory helps society understand what happened
during the WW2, why some so many Jewish people were killed by the Nazi soldiers, as they
were under an Agentic state of Adolf Hitler. It also makes us aware that we have a tendency

to obey unquestioningly, when we are under an agentic state, hence allowing us to guard
against the excesses that can result from blind obedience.

Social: Reducing prejudice behaviour

Prejudice is an attitude towards another person based on little or no actual knowledge on
them. SIT explains why people behave in a prejudice manner and why in-group identity and
out-group denigration can lead to aggression and negativity. There are three stages of the
SIT; Social categorisation which is the automatic act of putting ourselves and other into
particular social groups (in-groups and out-groups), Social Identification is when we adopt
the identity of a group; we begin to have norms and values of our group. Social Comparison
is when we compare our in group with one or more out group viewing them negatively in
order to raise our self-esteem.
Evaluation:

It could be argued that the improvements in football fan behaviour are not because
better understanding has led to tackling the in-out group issues but for fear of being
caught.

Useful applications, it helps to tackle prejudice as by changing group boundaries and

creating one big group.

The theory simplifies complex human theories. Social identities are bounded up in our
cultural history and range of factors of how we feel about another group, not the basic
drive to improve our social standing.

Supported by Sheriff

Contribution to society: Helps to tackle prejudice behaviour, hence making the society a
more peaceful place. Also helps to explain many issues that we see in everyday life such as
football hooliganism. When both groups have to work together to achieve a common goal
prejudices are also likely to be reduced.

Cognitive: Reliability of eyewitness testimonies

EWT refers to recalled memory of a witness of a crime or incident. Innocent people are
convicted on the basis of EWT alone, and are later been found innocent using DNA
evidence. This call to question the reliability of EWT. As is has been argued that Juries are
placing too much trust on them.
Reliable vs Unreliable:
EWT can be considered unreliable due to leading questions that distort peoples recall of the
memory, such as Loftus who found that pps can be affected by changing the words of the
question. When pps were asked how fast a car was going when it hit bumped collided etc.
Pps were found to give a higher estimate of speed if the word was smashed rather than
collided. Although, Yuille and Cutshall conducted a field experiment and found that leading
questions did not affect recall even five months after the incident.

It may also be considered unreliable due to weapon focus, where Loftus conducted a study
to see pps ability to recall customer face when held a gun and when not, she found that
recall was worse when customer had a gun. Although argued that EWT can be reliable if it
was a flashbulb memory as this means that there would be a clear recall as strong emotions
are tied to that incident.
However, EWT is considered unreliable due to poor line up procedure which can cause a
misidentification of a suspect, as simultaneous line ups (where all ppl are present together)
may lead to witness using relative judgment strategy (choose person who looks like they are
most likely to commit the crime). Although, Rinolo questioned 20 titanic survivors and found
15/20 witnesses able to recall event accurately many years later despite inaccurate media
coverage. Also cognitive interviews help improve EWT.
Bartlett proposed that Memory is like an imaginative reconstruction of past memories that is
influenced by how we encode, interpret and restore information. He also stated that memory
is not like a tape recorder as it changes when we recall it, this shows EWT are problems as
when we recover our memories they may be distorted.
Contribution to society: Factors effecting EWT are very valuable contributions to society
as it could help prevent innocent people from being wrongly convicted and spend time in
prison for crimes that have not committed but also in countries with death penalty it helps to
save lives.

Cognitive: Cognitive interview:

This is a questioning technique used by police to enhance retrieval of information from
witnesss memory. Geiselman and Fisherman compromised four techniques to conduct
interview; report everything, reinstate the context (mentally recreate environment), change
the order and changing the perspective. Reinstating the context means that people are able
to use cues in the environment to remember, as if the context is the same as time of learning
that recall is found to be greater, found by Godden and Baddeley. Leading questions is found
to distort memory by Loftus, hence pps are encouraged to divulge everything they remember
about the event first are then later asked questions.
Evaluation:
-

Requires trained professional which can be quite expensive.

Found to be effective by Fisher in a study in Florida as they looked at real crimes

and found witness recall