Developmental approach Strengths: Ethical issues can be easily overcome in the approach by implementing assent or gaining loco-parentis.
More holistic as considers more than one factor as it looks at interactions between nature and nurture.
Due to studying development, many studies in this approach are longitudinal which means that they get to investigate changes and how these changes are influenced over time. It can provide useful information about how we can better understand how children learn and deal with emotional difficulties and therefore improve the lives of children. Weaknesses: Ethical issues: Relies heavily on the use of children, therefore there are issues with gaining parental consent and debriefing children in a way that makes sense to them.
A lot of developmental research neglects adult development. This makes it harder to draw valid conclusions to whether adults are influenced in similar to children. Often developmental approaches tend to assume that all children follow the same developmental pathway.
This therefore ignores individual differences and if applied in a rigid manner, may not be helpful for children. Ethnocentrism Strengths: Understanding ethnocentrism can help us to understand how discrimination arises in the first place so that other cultures can be studied in more depth.
By understanding ethnocentrism, researchers are better prepared in addressing it, in order to improve researches generalisability. Having an awareness of ethnocentrism encourages researchers to use diverse samples which are more representative of cross cultural societies, increasing validity. Weaknesses: Ethnocentrism causes prejudice and discrimination which raises moral ethics, by discounting some cultures as unimportant and therefore not researching them.
Researchers must be aware of ethnocentrism when generalising and interpreting data in order to avoid biased and invalid findings. Socially sensitive research: Strengths: Carrying out socially sensitive research usually means that the researcher develops a personal relationship with participants and can often gain insightful data.
Weaknesses: Building relationships when carrying socially sensitive research can open issues with bias and subjectivity. Interviewing participants about sensitive topic may induce painful emotions and memories and therefore cause harm.
Hormones relating to Aggression. Eysenck's Personality Theory Evaluation Points. Evaluation of the dopamine and glutamate hypothesis. Reductionism - strengths and weaknesses. One of the most common ways reductionism is applied in the world today is the way reductionism has taken a cognitive approach in our society. They all, after all, have a shared evolutionary history, are found in the same individual, and many have direct influences on each other.
By combining the smaller parts of a situation as she suggests, sometimes these pieces do not all fit together when examined so closely individually.
But are all animals the same? The answer is obviously no, and showing an analogous example about humans can prove this. If we were to apply this to humans, we could say something like humans generally sleep for about seven to eight hours each night, eat a mix of fruits and vegetables and, depending on their habitat, large amounts of carbohydrates and sugary foods.
Applying this reductionist thinking to describe humans sounds a little ridiculous, because we obviously know that the above description does not apply to all humans everywhere. With this in mind, the same goes for animals; not all are alike, and by oversimplifying them because we generalized their behaviors in smaller ways then put them together creates overlooked facts that can make research more interesting and unique.
Another brief example of reductionism is the influence of certain ancient cultures on others. The Ancient Greeks created very foundational ideas and had a particular architecture and way of living that was unique to them.
But, when the Ancient Romans became a more massive empire, they were very much influenced by the Greeks. Then, Greeks and Romans influenced people in the general Mediterranean region. As you can see in each of these examples, reductionism involves taking psychological topics and breaking them down into a much more narrow focus. So why would researchers choose to take a reductionist approach when looking at different psychological phenomena?
While this process often involves oversimplifying things, there are ways reductionism can be useful. One of the major benefits of reductionism is that it allows researchers to look at things that can be incredibly varied and complex such as the human mind and behavior, and break them down into smaller parts that are easier to investigate. It allows researchers to focus on a specific problem. For example, researchers might utilize the reductionist approach when studying a psychiatric condition such as depression.
Rather than trying to account for all of the many different forces that may contribute to depression, a reductionist perspective might suggest that depression is caused by biological processes within the body. When approaching a truly difficult problem, it can be all too easy to become overwhelmed by all the questions and information that are available.
When studying psychological issues, for example, researchers might struggle to even form a basic hypothesis unless they find some way to focus their attention on a very small aspect of a phenomenon. While this point of view neglects other factors that might contribute, such as genetics, social relationships, and environmental variables , it gives researchers a more narrow focus of their studies.
By using reductionism to simplify what they want to study, researchers can explore a component is much greater depth. While reductionism has some important benefits, it also has a few significant downsides that should be noted. The clear downside of reductionism is that it is so totally focused on the smaller elements that contribute to a phenomenon that it fails to account for other forces that might play a role as well. In our above example, researchers taking a biological approach for explaining depression might focus their studies on chemical reactions and balances within the body that contribute to symptoms of depression.
While this type of research might lead to important medical advances in the treatment of depression, it excludes other variables such as cognitions, hereditary influences, personal problems, substance abuse, and other variables.
While reductionism can lead to exploring components of a phenomenon in greater depth, it also misses how these variables interact with one another. Few things have only one simple cause. Reductionism might allow researchers to look at each component individually, but it does not really explore how each of these smaller elements work together. Complex systems are dynamic and always changing, and it is often by looking at how things work together as a whole that we can gain a clearer picture of how something works.
There are a number of different approaches to psychology that are reflective of a reductionist approach to science including the following. Personality systems and tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator MBTI and the Enneagram are good examples of how reductionism can be used to break down aspects of psychology into smaller parts. The MBTI, for example, suggests that personality can be broken down and understood as four different dimensions.
These four dimensions—extraversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perceiving—are then used to represent a "type" that described each individual.
The biological approach to psychology is centered on understanding how the underlying biological processes contribute to human behavior. When approaching a psychological condition, for example, biopsychologists would suggest that the problem is the result of a biological process in the brain and body.
To treat the condition, they would recommend medications that treat the problem at the physiological level. The behaviorist approach to psychology focuses on how interactions with the environment contribute to learning and human behavior. This reductionism approach ignores other factors such as cognition and biology in favor of simply focusing on environmental influences.
A behaviorist might look at a psychological condition in terms of how present behavior has been caused by past learning.
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