Drawing on Chapter 6 of Investigating Psychology , evaluate…

jyvonne04    Drawing on Chapter 6 of Investigating Psychology , evaluate…  Drawing on Chapter 6 of Investigating Psychology, evaluate the usefulness of a quantitative approach to researching friendships in children and adolescents.Part 2: DE100 project report – Method Write the Method section of your DE100 project report.You will find relevant material in Chapter 6 of Investigating Psychology. There is a great deal of potentially useful information in this chapter, so you will need to be selective about the points on which you choose to focus.Section 1 introduces the concept of friendship to the reader. The section goes on to cover what friendship is, issues with defining friendship, potential requirements that are needed for a relationship to be categorised as a friendship and the influence that friendships may have on children’s behaviour. This material is mostly descriptive and will help to give you an overview for the essay. However, please keep any description of what friendship is in your essay brief, as your word count is limited and tutors will expect to see evidence of evaluation.Section 2 is where you should gain most of the information you need when considering the quantitative approach. Section 2 provides context for a study conducted by Bigelow and La Gaipa, who explored children’s understanding of friendship at various stages of development. This study collected qualitative data on friendships from children’s essays (children were asked to write about what they expected of their best friend in comparison with other friends) which they transformed into quantitative data using content analysis so that quantified comparisons could be made. As you are evaluating the usefulness of the quantitative approach, you may also want to draw on Section 2.1, which provides a description of content analysis and Box 6.1, which provides a critical evaluation of this approach to data analysis. This material will be useful for you when evaluating a quantitative approach to understanding friendships.Section 3 discusses two other methods that have been used to study friendships in children: (1) interviews, and (2) ethnography. This section highlights the differences between the two approaches, the potential limitations and strengths of both methods, and how each method can be used as a tool to uncover different types of information. The section also gives an example of the rich data that is likely to be collected from both ethnographic studies and interviews. Furthermore, the section shows that Corsaro and Bigelow and La Gaipa reached different conclusions based on the fact that the methods they used investigated childhood friendships in various ways. This section could therefore be used to critique the main claim in the essay by providing evidence that alternative methods are also useful in allowing researchers to understand children’s and adolescents’ friendships.You may also wish to look at the description of quantitative research on pages 15-18 of Chapter 1 of Investigating Methods. Further, more information about quantitative research is provided on pages 135-158 in Chapter 4 of Investigating Methods.Social SciencePsychology