Section B Loftus and Palmer Answer - January 2010 Core Studies

NOTE: You will need to aquire the January 2010 OCR Psychology Question paper for the questions. 

16a. One of the hypotheses in the Loftus and Palmer study was that using a leading question when asking someone to recall an incident would affect their recollection of what happened at the time.

16b. The sample used in the Loftus and Palmer study were 45 university students aged between 20 -25, split in to 5 different groups. A strength of using this sample is that it is a large sample and so the results gathered on the effects of leading questions can be used to generalise against the wider population. A weakness of using this sample is that the sample are all university students and so the results gathered can only be generalised against university students as there haven’t been any results gathered on the effect of leading questions on eye witness testimony for participants that are not university students; and so the sample are not representative of the whole population.

16c. One quantitative measure recorded in this study was the participants response to the question ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed in to each other?’ as the response given was a numerical value of 40.8mph, as it was an average speed and so it is a quantitative figure as it does not go in to much detail. The second quantitative measure in this study is from the second part of the study where the participants were shown clips of car crashes and told to give an estimated speed and then to return a week later to answer the question, ‘Did you see any broken glass?’. The group that had been given the verb ‘smashed’ said YES to this question 16 times, which is a numerical value and a quantitative measure as it measures the number of people that said yes to the question.

16d. One strength of using quantitative data is that it is easy to analyse and compare, and so for instance in the Loftus and Palmer study a strength of using quantitative data was that the investigators could analyse easily and compare the average speeds given by the participant when asked ‘How…