Chances are if you’re doing a psychology A Level you're doing it in part because numbers frighten you. It’s why I chose psychology. When I saw the final paper had research methods cropping up again I was quite worried to say the least.

Below you can see what’s expected of you in this final section.

First of all – Don’t panic as it’s very possible to get your head around this and there’s actually very little actual maths involved. Unlike the essay questions we covered previously for Psya3 and Psya4, for research methods we have to revert back to what we did at AS level and practice past psychology papers.

This section on initial glance looks scary but when you actually practice the past papers you begin to understand that there’sno real calculations involved and your simply interpreting information just like you’ve been doing with the essays. Most of the questions themselves are actually essay based and the only real “number element” comes when your having to interpret a study and identify which inferential analysis method you need to use (Spearman’s Rho, Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon or Chi-squared).

There will be one big essay style question worth 10 marks in this section, which will normally involve you designing a study of your own or analysing one given to you. This will require you to have a good understanding of one tailed, two tailed, alternate and null-hypotheses. You also need to identify an appropriate experimental design (repeated measures, matched pairs, independent measures, repeated measures) so its important you get your head around being able to tell the difference. You will likely be asked which inferential statistical test should be used too for the experiment you write about.

To make revision for this topic easier I have created a free research methods book, which you can download below:

Psya4 Research Methods Revision Book (PDF)

This book is completely free and is for all S-Cool and Loopa.co.uk readers.

The book combines all the previous research methods questions into a single book for you to work through with the answers at the back too. Practice them and cross-compare to see which you get right and wrong and keep doing it until you begin to understand why your getting them wrong and begin to improve your score.

This really helped me in improving my grasp of the research methods section and should help you too.

Loopa - AQA Psychology A* Revision – Saj Devshi