Aggression

1) Why might Bandura et al. have chosen to record the

children’s behaviour in 5-second intervals, rather than 1-
second or 1-minute intervals?
- Bandura et al wanted to increase both validity and
reliability therefor opted for 5 second intervals instead of
1 second which is too short of a time to observe a change
in behaviour and 1-minute intervals which is too long and
they won’t be able to observe what had happened within
the one minute
2) Consider the data for the mean aggressive behaviours
and the non-imitative verbal responses.
a) Which are qualitative data?
- Non- imitative verbal responses
b) Which are quantitative data?
-mean aggressive behaviour
3) The procedure was standardised in many ways
a) Identify the ways in which the procedure was
standardised.
- There was a total of 72 children and they were split into 3
equal groups (24 children each)
- They made sure that the children more likely to exhibit
aggressive behaviours were equally split
- The same 3 experiment rooms were used for all 3 groups
 b) Explain why Standardisation was necessary- what
might have happened if each participant had not been
treated in the same way?
- It would show that the experiment was not reliable as
participants were treated differently therefore results will
be unreliable

Textbook answers:
1) If the time interval was too large the observers may have
missed important behaviours which occurred between intervals
and if the interval was too small it would be difficult to record
such difficult behaviours
2)a) the non-imitative verbal responses
b) the mean aggressive behaviours
3)a) all of the children in both experimental groups saw a model
for the same length of time and children were all exposed to the
same materials/behaviours in the same order. Also, the
observation period and time interval were the same for all
participants
b) Standardising the procedure means the research was more
valid- the researchers could be sure that the difference in results
between conditions were due to the differences between the
models- and more reliable, because each child within a condition
experienced exactly the same exposure