By Mrs Harrold (Head of Psychology)

Over the final half term, Psychology students in the Lower Sixth are preparing to design, implement, write-up and review a cognitive study on their peers. As part of this, they will be covering several more sections of the Research Methods on the AQA specification and, this week, have been focusing on sampling.

To enable psychologists to infer meaningful conclusions from their research, they try to ensure the individuals who make up the ‘sample’ they are testing are representative of the overall population from which they are drawn. There are several different sampling techniques psychologists can use and, whilst our students have learned that the method they will use through necessity in their actual study, sadly, is one of the more ungeneralisable ones, they did at least have the opportunity to practise the more complicated sampling techniques on a varied and uncomplaining population of Smarties.

Going through the processes for each of the techniques and taking time to consider how representative the actual sample produced was for their specific tube of Smarties allowed them to practise the methods psychologists use in the wild, and gave them a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the various techniques. Both results will help students answer examination questions with confidence and clarity as we move towards our second year of the course.