issues and debates

• Culture Bias:
• Cultural Norms - Tavris (1993): Tavris (1993) argues that most cultures take male behaviour as the standard.
• Artificial Differences: Research methods could create artificial differences or mask real ones.
• Marginalised Female Concerns: Female concerns may be marginalised due to the predominance of male researchers.
• Research Sample Equality: Beta bias can be avoided by ensuring the sample is equally female as male.
• Gender Bias: A key limitation of psychological research is that issues of gender bias go unchallenged.
• Institutional Sexism: Psychology may be guilty of supporting a form of institutional sexism that creates biased theories and research.
• Feminist Criteria - Worrell and Remer (1992): Feminists Worrell and Remer (1992) put forward several criteria that should be adhered to avoid the gender bias within research.
• Cultural Bias: A tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all phenomena through the lens of one's own culture.
• Double Standard: Such accounts are often politically motivated which creates a 'double standard' in the way that the same behaviour is viewed from a male and a female perspective.
• Somatic Depression: In some cultures, depression may be experienced largely in somatic terms rather than with sadness and guilt.
• Milgram Study: In his study, he used a sample of only American males and found that 65% of participants administered a full scale of what the participant claimed to be real electric shocks.
• Ainsworth Study: Conducted in America, she tested children's anxiety on separation from their mother and found that the ideal attachment type was secure.
• Beta Bias: When real cultural differences are ignored or minimised and all people are assumed to be the same.
• Alpha Bias: When a theory assumes that cultural groups are profoundly different, recognising these differences must always inform research.
• Emic Constructs: These are specific to a given culture and vary from one culture to another, looking at behaviour from inside cultural systems.
• Etic Constructs: Analyses behaviour from outside the culture, focusing on the universality of human behaviour across all cultures.
• Ethnocentrism: The term used to describe the belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic and cultural group.
• Culture: The beliefs and customs that a group of people share, such as child-rearing practices.
• Cultural Relativism: The term used to describe the belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic and cultural group.