Practical activities — OCR A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Practical activities with OCR A-Level practice questions.
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Practical activities explained
Running your own small-scale research practicals is where research methods stops being vocabulary.
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Before any data is gathered, you write a risk assessment and management plan: list the hazards, say who could be harmed and how seriously, then state the control measure and what risk remains. In a psychology practical, hazards are rarely physical. They include distress raised by the topic, breaches of confidentiality, safeguarding where participants are under sixteen, and approaching strangers. Ethical safeguards follow the British Psychological Society code: informed consent, right to withdraw, confidentiality, and a debrief. Finally, you must analyse the data you actually gathered rather than the pattern you hoped for, selecting appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics.
Learners should have experience of the following practical activities: self-report; observation; experiment; correlation.
Four methods, four different kinds of claim. Asking people directly reaches thoughts and feelings nothing else can reach, but it invites social desirability; Chaney and colleagues relied on parental reports and found that children with asthma used the Funhaler far more willingly than their usual inhaler. Watching behaviour as it happens, coded against categories agreed beforehand, keeps the behaviour real; Bandura, Ross and Ross counted imitative acts and found that children who had seen an adult attack a doll reproduced those specific acts. Manipulating one variable while holding the rest steady is what licenses a claim about cause. Measuring two variables as they already vary does not, and Maguire found posterior hippocampal grey matter increased with years of taxi driving, which is not the same as saying the driving caused it.
Your focus
- Conduct a risk assessment for a small-scale psychological practical, identifying hazards and appropriate management strategies.
- Apply ethical guidelines to the design and execution of a student-led research project.
- Select and justify appropriate methods to analyse data gathered from a small-scale practical.
Show all 6 objectives
- Apply appropriate design features to self-report, observation, experiment and correlation methods, including operationalised categories, pilot studies and scattergrams.
- Compare the strengths and weaknesses of the four practical methods, contrasting access to internal states or real conduct with risks of social desirability or observer bias.
- Analyse the types of conclusions drawn from different methods, distinguishing between cause and effect in experiments and strength and direction in correlations, and select appropriate statistical tests for the data.
Practical activities exam tips
Marking Points
- A risk assessment names the hazard, the person at risk, how likely and how severe the harm is, and the control measure; the control has to be attached to a specific hazard.
- Give ethical safeguards in the language of the code: informed consent or parental consent for participants under sixteen, right to withdraw stated at the start and honoured during, confidentiality, and a full debrief.
- Justify the analysis chosen by three things together: the level of measurement, whether the design is independent or repeated, and whether the study tests a difference or an association.
- Treat distress as a risk to be managed rather than merely mentioned; sensitive topics are avoided, participants are reminded they may stop, and anyone upset is debriefed and directed to support.
- Pair each strength with its matching weakness: asking people directly gives access to internal states but risks social desirability and demand characteristics, while watching behaviour gives real conduct but risks observer bias unless categories are operationalised and inter-rater reliability is checked.
- Only a manipulated independent variable with controlled extraneous variables supports a cause and effect conclusion; a relationship between two measured variables supports a claim about strength and direction only.
- Name the design features a marker looks for, including operationalised behavioural categories with time or event sampling, closed and open items with a pilot study, and a scattergram reported alongside a coefficient.
- Match the test to the method when asked: a relationship between two sets of ordinal scores uses Spearman, while a difference between two independent groups of ordinal scores uses Mann Whitney.
Examiner Tips
- 💡Expect a scenario asking you to identify one risk in a described practical and suggest how the researcher would manage it, where two marks usually means one risk plus one specific control.
- 💡Questions about your own practical work have to be answered generically in the exam, so rehearse one self-report, one observation, one experiment and one correlation that you genuinely ran.
- 💡Scenario questions ask you to identify the method and justify the identification, so quote the feature in the stem that gives it away, such as a manipulated variable or two scores taken from each person.
- 💡Be ready to suggest a different method for the same aim and explain what is gained and lost by the change, which is a standard four mark item.
- 💡Where a question lets you choose a method, pick the one you can evaluate best and justify it against the stated aim rather than in general terms.
Common Mistakes
- Writing a risk assessment that lists only physical hazards such as trailing cables, and missing the psychological and safeguarding risks that actually apply to a classroom study.
- Conflating confidentiality with anonymity. Confidentiality means keeping known identities secure and not disclosing them with the data, whereas anonymity means no identifying information is collected in the first place.
- Gathering data first and choosing the analysis afterwards, which regularly leaves a student holding nominal data and planning to calculate a mean.
- Writing that a relationship proves one variable affects the other, when a third variable or reversed causation is always possible; that single word costs the mark.
- Calling any study conducted outside a laboratory an observation. A field experiment still manipulates an independent variable and is still an experiment.
- Defining behavioural categories so loosely that two observers could not agree, for example recording aggression rather than hits, kicks or throws an object.