Is anyone studing on an access course HS?

Question

hi waiching liu i am struggling with one or two assignments psyhcology-rosenhan experiment &sociology-inequality in british education in the last 50yrs

Answer 1

Have a chat to you lecturer. Good luck

Answer 2

Hi! I used to teach the psychology part of an access to humanities course, so I can help you with the Rosenhan experiment.

Rosenhan wanted to show how much psychologists disagree or were inconsistent with each other when diagnosing mental disorders, such as schizophrenia (in psychological terms, he was basically saying that the definitions of mental disorders when he did his experiment lacked inter-observer reliability=inter=between, observer=watcher, reliability=consistency-i.e. if you do something again and again, you should get the same results-so when diagnosing mental disorders, two people using the same definition should agree about whether someone has a mental disorder or not).

In the being Sane in insane places study (Rosenhan, 1973), a group of 8 healthy people (including Rosenhan himself, Martin Seligman who is now a famous psychologist, a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, a psychology graduate student, a housewife and a painter) went to different psychiatric hospitals and reported hearing voices which said things like empty and thud. Every single person was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. As soon as they went into the hospitals, the people stopped reporting these false symptoms. The length of hospital stay ranged from 7-52 days. The'pseudopatients' were never found out and were eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia in remission. However, many of the other patients in the hospital (35 out of 118 in the first 3 hospitalizations of the pseudopatients) noticed that they were faking it. E.g. one person, said 'you're not crazy.' You're a journalist/ a professor. You're checking up on the hospital.'

From these findings, Rosenhan concluded that psychologists were unable to tell the difference between who is sane and who isn't. As a result, the guidelines for diagnosis were tightened up. However, as Cardwell points out, hearing voices IS the most common symptoms of schizophrenia and the clinicians would probably have been in more trouble for turning away people who who may have had a mental disorder than admitting people who may have turned out not to have a mental disorder.

I hope this answer helps with your psychology asignment. Unfortunately, I've never studied or taught Sociology before, so I can't help you with that one. However, the recommended reading for Sociology in my current college is:

Sociology: themes and perspectives-Holburn, M, Halambros, M and Heald, R. M.

Sociology in Focus AS/A2 for AQA. I'm not sure if the inequality in Education is an AS or A2 topic, so you need to check both books if your college/local library has them.


For further information, you may want to read one of the following books:

Psychology for A2 level-Cardwell, M, Clark, L and Meldrum, C

Psychology: The science of Mind and behaviour-Gross, R

Look under the chapter: issues in the diagnosis & classification of psychological abnormality

By the way, if you need anymore Psychology help, click onto my free, non commercial, non-profit making teaching resource website and click on the e-mail link. My website address is:

www.freewebs.com/psychedout

Failing that as the previous answer says, have a word with your tutor. That's what he/she is there for!
Good luck with your assignments!