Transcripts
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few questions to go away – the response rate for personal interviews is actually far higher than these other methods. People find it a lot more difficult to turn away somebody who’s sort of standing there in front of them. The problem with personal interviews, of course, is that the interviewer is there and the interviewer themselves can bias the results, and I think it’s a lesson in research in general that interviewer bias, of course, is to be avoided, but if you’ve got somebody in person and they say ‘Well how about …?’ or ‘Do you mean …?’ and this kind of thing and this is where distortions can come in. So, personal interviews are good – high response rates – but there is the problem of bias and of course they’re very expensive, you’re employing real people to ask these questions.
Telephone interviewing: less expensive, but a less good response rate and again some problems of bias. There’s a problem whenever you’re a person who’s asking another person questions. There’s always a problem of bias because you want people to expand on their answers and you want people to sort of chat about what they’re interested in and therefore you have to interact with them and that interaction is what can cause the biases. The alternative is to have a very strict interviewing schedule and a very strict questionnaire, and you do get this particularly on the telephone where, you know, you get this sort of automaton who’s actually a person but they’re … it’s a very stilted kind of interview and some would say that the quality of the data that is collected as a result is not that high. So we’re concentrating on postal questionnaires but accepting that you need a good data collection device.
CD2 Track 7 Ex 3.2
Listen to Part 1 of the extract describing how the experiments were carried out. Complete the notes.
Social learning Part 1
So it seems very plausible that monkeys in the wild learn to fear snakes from other monkeys who’ve already acquired the fear. And Mineka set up an experimental situation where observer monkeys could watch – who were, of course, naïve and didn’t fear snakes initially, as you’ll see – could watch a demonstrator who previously had learnt fear of snakes, for example, a
wild-caught monkey. And the question is: what would the observers learn from the demonstrator? To explain the procedure before I show you the data, the observers were tested three times. First of all a pre-test when they were still naïve and they’d never seen a demonstrator acting afraid of snakes; a post-test immediately after they’d seen a demonstrator acting afraid of snakes; and then a follow-up three months later, with no intervening training, to see whether whatever they’d learnt was persistent. And the way the observers were tested was in a ‘choice circus’, which was just a round arena with four objects at the four corners, one of which was a model snake, and the other three were neutral objects, and they simply measured how much time the observer monkey would spend near the snake. If they were not frightened of snakes they’d spend about quarter of the time near the snake and a quarter of the time near the other objects. If they were afraid of the snake, they’d spend very little time near the snake and much, much more time near the other objects. So, how much time they spend near the snake is one measure of fear. The other measure of fear is that they used something called a ‘Wisconsin test apparatus’, which is an apparatus simply where monkeys have to reach over a gap to get food, and if you put a frightening stimulus in a glass box in the gap, the monkeys will be reluctant to reach over it to get to the food. So in this test they put either a real snake or a toy snake in a glass box and looked to see how slow the observers were to reach over the snake to get a tempting bit of food. And the slower they were and the more disturbed their behaviour, the more frightened they were concluded to be of snakes. So the question is: how did the observers’ behaviour change as a function of watching the demonstrators?
CD2 Track 8 Ex 3.4
Listen to Part 2 of the extract. Make notes on the results and the conclusion the speaker draws from the results.
Part 2
What do the observers do? OK, here they are on the pre-test when they’re not afraid of snakes at all, and as you can see they divide their time equally between the four stimuli. They show no avoidance of snakes at all at the pre-test. But at the post-test – when they’ve had an opportunity to watch an observer who is
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