Research Methods Essays Example

Research Methods

1. What biases might someone have that could influence their selection of sources to summarize for the topic of eyewitness testimony? How might these biases then influence their recommendation to the client?
Misleading feature during facial recognition is a bias; most of the present eyewitnesses cannot clearly recall the exact facial characteristics. This can be misleading to a client during judgment. Verbal information from a witness can include both misleading information and truthful information as demonstrated by the Loftus experiment. The experiment showed that false and accurate information, if presented to an eyewitness, becomes the part of his memory and hence jeopardize client case during eye witnessing. The eye witness can also play with the psychology to conceal some viable information from the juror hence putting client's case in danger. This calls for wisdom from the client side while making recommendations, client while find it more trustworthy to rely on expert witness than eye witness while recommending.
2. A. Beneficence and nonmaleficence
The APA ethical standards provide researchers with ethics codes to be considered while making critical research decisions. The high standards initiated by psychologists while conducting a research limits them hence concrete discoveries cannot be made. The standards make it very difficult for researchers and psychologist to merge the two because it focuses more on the risk than benefits of crime research.

B. Justice

In terms of justice, the two actions might or might not compromise with the accused that can be guilty depending on the magnitude that the researchers are willing to go to pursue the truth. Non-maleficence try not to harm the offender so as to get information that will yield justice. Beneficence action, on the other hand, try to benefit the offended, this places a researcher at crossroads on which way to go hence offers a challenge.
C. Respect for people’s rights and dignity
Cultural practices, privacy, age, gender, ethnicity, and race are some of the factors considered while psychologist undertakes their research. These factors at a time might block crucial information to the researcher, the information blocked might be the only way to fair judgment hence rights and dignity offers a big challenge to the researcher.
3. The sampling was done in various studies, scales of measurement and questionnaires. The named sampling techniques provided wide knowledge that is reliable and can be used to give a conclusive result. The techniques give information on both reliability and its weakness since it human memory dependable. The fact that it depends on human memory that can be fabricated or changed depending on the current situation makes eyewitness unreliable (Sporer, 2014). The so discussed weakness makes expert witness more reliable since it evidence and accumulated knowledge based.
4. Some of the main factors that influence the accuracy of the information given by the eyewitness include stress and anxiety, reconstructive memory and weapon focus. The three factors play a key role in influencing the information that eyewitness will deliver. Eyewitnesses are often accurate with real-life robbery incidence where gunshot are involved even after a long time, but misleading questions can lead to distortion of information (Lindsay, 2013). Reconstructive memory, on the other hand, depends on one's belief, and culture hence cannot be relied upon on a standard court platform. Weapon of focus is the worse strategy that an eyewitness can use to conceal important information for judgment.
5. Eye witnessing is very important in making court decisions, in cognitive psychology it is a very important aspect thus it reliability and validity is core. The measurement of eyewitness validity can be done through weapon of focus, reconstructive memory and anxiety (Lindsay, 2013). The measurement will enhance the validity since eye witness validity, and reliability can be relied upon because the individual was at the scene of the crime. All the incidences that happened are imprinted in one's memory; the investigator will just need to provide a conducive environment for the eyewitness to give reliable and valid information.

References

Lindsay, R. C., Ross, D. F., Read, J. D., & Toglia, M. P. (Eds.). (2013). The Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology: Volume II: Memory for People (Vol. 2). Psychology Press.
Sporer, S. L., Malpass, R. S., & Koehnken, G. (Eds.). (2014). Psychological issues in eyewitness identification. Psychology Press.