past questions on research methods

AQA A-Level Psychology Past Papers With Answers

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AQA A-Level Psychology (7182) and AS-Level Psychology (7181) past exam papers and marking schemes. The past papers are free to download for you to use as practice for your exams.

• Download Past Paper : A-Level (7182)
• Download Past Paper : AS (7181)
• Download Mark Scheme : A-Level (7182)
• Download Mark Scheme : AS (7181)

November 2021 (Labelled as June 2021)

November 2020 (Labelled as June 2020)

• Download Past Paper: A-Level (7182)
• Download Past Paper: AS (7181)

• Download Mark Scheme: A-Level (7182)

• Download Past Paper
• Download Mark Scheme

A-Level AQA Psychology Questions by Topic

Finish sign up, filter by paper, core content, 1. social influence.

3. Attachment

4 . Psychopathology

5 . Approaches in Psychology

6. Biopsychology

7 . research methods, 8. issues and debates in psychology, 9. relationships.

11. Cognition and Development

12. Schizophrenia

13. eating behaviour, 15. aggression, 16. forensic psychology, 17. addiction.

Questions to test students’ understanding of research methods

How to craft questions for closed book examinations on undergraduate research methods

Adrian Man-Ho Lam

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Research methods are a compulsory component of many undergraduate programmes. But it is challenging to design good questions for assessing students’ understanding of research methods in closed book exams. There is a fine balance between ensuring the often broad and ambitious course objectives and content are fully reflected in the questions while avoiding asking students to replicate all the research procedures.

In the final exam for our research methods class, we include eight to 10 varied questions. Below are some common types:

Defining key concepts and terminologies

While research methods are not purely technical and procedural, there is a need for students to understand the foundational theories before they proceed further. So, we set basic and factual questions to check students’ fundamental understanding of various research concepts and terminologies. This is not aimed at forcing students to memorise definitions or exact wording. We want students to understand and explain concepts in their own words.

• What is a critical case study?
• What is the difference between a panel survey and a longitudinal survey?

Giving real-world examples

The best way for students to demonstrate that they understand the research concepts is by giving real-world examples as concrete illustrations or applications. We go further by asking students to use their own daily experiences and observations to illustrate research concepts in their own words. This process helps students to understand and reflect on how the concepts fit into a greater societal context that is far more interesting.

• Explain what is a measurement reliability , with an example.
• Use an example to illustrate the Belmont Report ethical principle of justice in research involving human subjects.

Application of real-life contexts

Students should be capable of making sense of complex research concepts by applying them in real-life research contexts. But rather than asking them to draft a full research proposal which would involve framing research questions, identifying variables, stating measurement tools, framing research instruments and so on, we can ask questions that focus on just one or two of these components. In this way, we can check whether students understand the crux of various research items.

• Construct an example of 2x2 factorial design in a survey experiment that investigates public opinion towards foreign immigration.
• Write a research question and explain how you can personally use participant observation to answer the question.

Doing simple mathematical calculations

Although students often feel anxious about the quantitative part, it is essential for them to have a basic understanding of the mathematical or statistical steps and procedures relating to research calculations. To check their understanding of fundamental statistical concepts, we ask them to do or describe simple calculations that are manageable under the time and space constraints of the exam.

• Chelsea conducted a survey to study turnout patterns in the last Student Council election. She collected the following data. Consider the respondent’s Grade Point Average, calculate the mean and compare it with the median.
• Describe without using any numbers or mathematical symbols the steps for conducting a t-test for the difference in means .

Offering evidence-based commentaries

To facilitate deeper thinking on a variety of research concepts, we ask students to assess and respond to a number of hypothetical research claims and scenarios, using sound reasoning and concrete evidence.

• Ren Shen suspects that taking Ginseng Tonic will improve academic performance. He surveys his classmates and finds that those who take it have an average GPA score significantly higher than those who do not. He concludes that taking it will improve GPA scores. Is Ren Shen’s causal conclusion a credible one? Explain.
• Suppose you have invented a time machine that allows you to travel between the past and the present. Explain how you may potentially use your machine to solve the fundamental problem of causal inference.

Aligning with real research in the field

To align students’ learning with authentic research, some questions can be rooted in real research. These might include asking students to identify the relevant information in an abstract, summarising the research design, or interpreting the relevant data output and making resulting conclusions. The following research experiment conducted by the team has a number of ethical problems. Identify one of these problems.

• Consider the following regression output. Identify the dependent and independent variables. Which variables are statistically significant? How do you know?

Adrian Man-Ho Lam is course tutor in the department of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong.

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Research Methods ( AQA A Level Psychology )

Topic questions.

A psychologist was interested in finding out whether dream themes differed between males and females, particularly in terms of social interaction. She decided to conduct a pilot study. Twenty undergraduate students (8 male and 12 female) volunteered for the study. For a six-week period the students were interviewed at 9 am each morning when they arrived at university. Interviewers, who did not know the purpose of the study, carried out and recorded the dream interviews.

Another researcher, who did not know the purpose of the study, carried out a content analysis of the interview data.  

Explain how this content analysis could have been conducted.

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A psychologist decided to conduct an experiment to investigate the effect of watching horror films before going to bed. A volunteer sample of 50 university students consented to take part in the experiment. The 50 students were randomly split into two groups. Group 1 watched a horror film before going to bed each night for the first week then a romantic comedy before going to bed each night for the second week. Group 2 watched the romantic comedy in the first week and the horror film in the second week. When the students woke up each morning, each student received a text message that asked if they had had a nightmare during the night. They could respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

The psychologist used a repeated measures design in this experiment. Explain why it was important to use a repeated measures design in this case.

A psychologist wanted to test whether listening to music improves running performance. 

The psychologist conducted a study using 10 volunteers from a local gym. The psychologist used a repeated measures design. Half of the participants were assigned to condition A (without music) and half to condition B (with music). 

All participants were asked to run 400 metres as fast as they could on a treadmill in the psychology department. All participants were given standardised instructions. All participants wore headphones in both conditions. The psychologist recorded their running times in seconds. The participants returned to the psychology department the following week and repeated the test in the other condition.

Identify the type of experiment used in this study. Shade one box only.

Choose your answer

People’s perception of how they spend their time at the gym is often not very accurate. Some spend more time chatting than on the treadmill. A psychologist decides to observe the actual behaviour of an opportunity sample of gym users at a local gym.

Explain why it is more appropriate for the psychologist to use an observation than a questionnaire in this case.

Design an observational study to investigate how people spend their time at the gym.

In your answer you will be awarded credit for providing appropriate details of:  

• type of observation with justification
• operationalised behavioural categories
• use of time and/or event sampling with justification
• how reliability of data collection could be assessed.

A psychologist wanted to test whether listening to music while walking increases the number of miles walked in a week. She obtained a volunteer sample of 20 adults and asked 10 of them to walk for 3 days during one week while listening to music and the other half to walk for 3 days during one week not listening to music. At the end of the week each participant self-reported the number of miles they had walked.

Explain one problem with the method used to determine the number of miles walked in the week. Suggest an alternative measure that would overcome this problem.

Explain how the psychologist could continue her investigation by carrying out thematic analysis of the interview recordings.

What is meant by a pilot study? Explain one possible reason why the psychologist decided to conduct a pilot study for this investigation.

The interviews produced qualitative data. What is meant by qualitative data? Give one strength of collecting qualitative data in this study

A researcher wanted to investigate agoraphobia by studying Patient X. The researcher designed a questionnaire to find out about Patient X’s experiences. However, a colleague suggested that the researcher might do better to conduct a case study. Explain one or more reasons why it might be better to conduct a case study than a questionnaire.

Which of the following is correct? Shade one circle only.

Groups A and B are conditions of the dependent variable and happiness is the independent variable.

Groups A and B are conditions of the independent variable and happiness is the dependent variable.

Groups A and B are the controls and happiness is the experimental condition.

Groups A and B are the experimental conditions and happiness is the control.

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100 questions (and answers) about research methods

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• Part 1. Understanding the Research Process and Getting Started
• Part 2. Reviewing and Writing About Your Research Question
• Part 3. Introductory Ideas About Ethics
• Part 4. Research Methods: Knowing the Language, Knowing the Ideas
• Part 5. Sampling Ideas and Issues
• Part 6. Describing Data Using Descriptive Techniques
• Part 7. All About Testing and Measuring
• Part 8. Understanding Different Research Methods
• Part 9. All About Inference and Significance.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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Past Examination Questions

Record detail, department of sociology.

• SOCI 305: RESEARCH METHODS

INSTRUCTIONS (READ CAREFULLY): ANSWER QUESTION ONE IN SECTION A, TWO QUESTIONS FROM SECTION B AND ALL QUESTIONS IN SECTION C. IN VIEW OF SECTION C, ALL RESIT CANDIDATES ARE TO ANSWER AN ADDITIONAL QUESTION IN SECTION B. WRITE YOUR RESEARCH GROUP NUMBER OR RESIT (AS APPROPRIATE) ON THE COVER PAGE OF YOUR ANSWER BOOKLET. TIME ALLOWED: TWO AND HALF (2.5) HOURS

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A Level Psychology Topic Quiz - Research Methods

Last updated 5 May 2017

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Here is an overall topic quiz on research methods as featured in the AQA A Level Psychology specification.

Each time you take this quiz you will get 10 MCQs drawn at random from over 100 questions relevant to research methods. Try the first ten, see how you get on, and then try again with 10 different questions!

Core Topics Revision Flashcards for AQA A-Level Psychology

Printed Resource

• Research Methods
• Laboratory Experiment
• Correlation Coefficient
• Coding: Content Analysis

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Methods in Context Questions: A Full Mark Answer from the AQA

Table of Contents

Last Updated on September 14, 2021 by Karl Thompson

Below I provide an example full mark answer to a methods in context question taken from the AQA’s 2016 Specimen A-level sociology paper 7192 (1) and provide some running commentary on this model answer.

NB – I also outline why the AQA has (IMO) miss-marked this exemplar… I don’t think it should get full marks, because IT DOES NOT do what the mark scheme says it should do to get 20/20. However… it’s still a good answer…!

About Methods in Context Questions:

Methods in Context questions will ask students to evaluate the strengths and limitations of any of the six main research methods for researching a particular topic within the sociology of education , applying material from the item.

Students often struggle with these questions and so it is useful to have exemplars which demonstrate how to answer them.

The Specific Question with Item:

Mark Scheme (top band only: 17-20)

Answers in this band will show accurate, conceptually detailed knowledge and sound understanding of a range of relevant material on structured interviews.

Evaluation of the usefulness of structured interviews will be explicit and relevant. Analysis will show clear explanation. Appropriate conclusions will be drawn.

Student Answer

KT’s comments in bold and red beneath each paragraph…

Structured interviews are usually closed-ended interviews which produce reliable, quantitative data. They are relatively quick to carry out and require little training. If the school agrees to the research taking place the researcher would be able to get a large sample of pupils. However, these interviews, although preferred by positivists, are limiting because the questions are fixed. The quantitative nature of the interviews means they are ideal for examining cause and effect such as whether parent attending parents’ evening has an impact on the pupils’ education.

This is a good example of a paragraph where the candidate may think they’ve said something at level 4 or 5, but really it’s down at level 3!

This is a solid ‘mark band level 5’ paragraph – the method applied specifically to the topic under investigation.

Another problem with unstructured interviews is they are inflexible. Closed questions with limited responses will only give the options chosen by the researcher and so may miss vital aspects of home life that could have an impact on a child’s achievement such as temporary housing or domestic abuse. This is likely if the parents are working class and the sociologist is middle class and does not have experience of working class life or know the concerns or worries facing working-class families.

Seems like a solid level 5 paragraph again.

A problem with structured interviews with pupils is that most of them will be under 18. This means that they are unable to give their consent and this will cause some ethical concerns. Parents will be unlikely to give their consent because they will feel a sense of shame or they just may not want their child to be part of the research which asked them to give personal details about the parent-child relationship.

A clear level 5 response… teachers not knowing about home background… one of the clearest level 5 responses in the whole essay.

20/20 marks awarded

There’s another example of a methods in context essay here ! And for more examples of model answers to exam questions, please see the links on my main page on exam advice !

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• 10 Research Question Examples to Guide Your Research Project

10 Research Question Examples to Guide your Research Project

Published on October 30, 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on October 19, 2023.

The research question is one of the most important parts of your research paper , thesis or dissertation . It’s important to spend some time assessing and refining your question before you get started.

The exact form of your question will depend on a few things, such as the length of your project, the type of research you’re conducting, the topic , and the research problem . However, all research questions should be focused, specific, and relevant to a timely social or scholarly issue.

Once you’ve read our guide on how to write a research question , you can use these examples to craft your own.

Note that the design of your research question can depend on what method you are pursuing. Here are a few options for qualitative, quantitative, and statistical research questions.

Other interesting articles

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, October 19). 10 Research Question Examples to Guide your Research Project. Scribbr. Retrieved August 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-process/research-question-examples/

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• News Releases

Glimpse into the nanoworld: microscope reveals tiniest cell processes

Research team including Göttingen University develops high-resolution fluorescence microscope

University of Göttingen

Representation of the highly sensitive detector that is part of the newly developed fluorescence microscope. It consists of 23 individual detectors, enabling the resolution to be doubled.

Credit: Alexey Chizhik, Göttingen University

What does the inside of a cell really look like? In the past, standard microscopes were limited in how well they could answer this question. Now, researchers from the Universities of Göttingen and Oxford, in collaboration with the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), have succeeded in developing a microscope with resolutions better than five nanometres (five billionths of a metre). This is roughly equivalent to the width of a hair split into 10,000 strands. Their new method was published in  Nature Photonics.

Many structures in cells are so small that standard microscopes can only produce fragmented images. Their resolution only begins at around 200 nanometres. However, human cells for instance contain a kind of scaffold of fine tubes that are only around seven nanometres wide. The synaptic cleft, meaning the distance between two nerve cells or between a nerve cell and a muscle cell, is just 10 to 50 nanometres – too small for conventional microscopes. The new microscope, which researchers at the University of Göttingen have helped to develop, promises much richer information. It benefits from a resolution better than five nanometres, enabling it to capture even the tiniest cell structures. It is difficult to imagine something so tiny, but if we were to compare one nanometre with one metre, it would be the equivalent of comparing the diameter of a hazelnut with the diameter of the Earth.

This type of microscope is known as a fluorescence microscope. Their function relies on “single-molecule localization microscopy”, in which individual fluorescent molecules in a sample are switched on and off and their individual positions are then determined very precisely. The entire structure of the sample can then be modelled from the positions of these molecules. The current process enables resolutions of around 10 to 20 nanometres. Professor Jörg Enderlein's research group at the University of Göttingen's Faculty of Physics has now been able to double this resolution again – with the help of a highly sensitive detector and special data analysis. This means that even the tiniest details of protein organization in the connecting area between two nerve cells can be very precisely revealed.

"This newly developed technology is a milestone in the field of high-resolution microscopy. It not only offers resolutions in the single-digit nanometre range, but it is also particularly cost-effective and easy to use compared to other methods,” explains Enderlein. The scientists also developed an open-source software package for data processing in the course of publishing their findings. This means that this type of microscopy will be available to a wide range of specialists in the future.

Original publication:  Jörg Enderlein et al. “ Doubling the resolution of fluorescence-lifetime single-molecule localization microscopy with image scanning microscopy”.   Nature Photonics 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41566-024-01481-4

Professor Jörg Enderlein

University of Göttingen

Faculty of Physics – Biophysics and complex systems

Friedrich Hund Platz 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

Tel: +49 (0)551 39 26908

Email:  [email protected]

www.joerg-enderlein.de/

Nature Photonics

10.1038/s41566-024-01481-4

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Doubling the resolution of fluorescence-lifetime single-molecule localization microscopy with image scanning microscopy

Article Publication Date

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

Original Source

Translations.