This article addresses the purpose of case studies, and how they are important and interesting tools of evidence and research in the psychology field. They provide psychologists with plenty of interesting examples with sources, but what this article presents are the possible flaws of case studies. Sometimes a client/patient isn't a great resource, may be they can't recall what exactly happened, may be they don't want to. Sometimes, even though information is coming directly from the source, it can be unreliable. Also, when you have someone interviewing someone, you only really have to go off of what the researcher is getting out of them, which may have be slightly biased to try to prove a theory for example.
The main example in this article is on a girl named "Jane Doe". Her parents were struggling for custody after a divorce, and when her father reported that his daughter had mentioned something to her stepmother, about being hurt by her mother, they had a psychologist, David Corwin check out the situation. Jane was 6 years old when she was interviewed on tape three times. Se described her mother hurting her, through sexual abuse. She clearly was more comfortable around her father, who was more reliable (after doing background checks when Jane's mother accused her father of fraud), much more than her mother who had been married several times and been in jail on account of fraud. Her father had only had a serious marriage right before the one to Jane's mother. Jane's father got custody, and later when Jane was 17, she agreed to be inteviewed again on tape. Initially, when confronted again she remembered those accusations against her mom, she said she remembered telling someone her mother had hurt her, and then immediately, she started to cry, as all the repressed memeories came back to her.
This related to what we discussed in class about having traumatizing things happen to you that you completely block out of your memory, and this continued to be important research in memory psychology.
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/JaneDoe.htm
3 comments:
This Article is a very abstract thinking of case studies. Its crazy to think that scenerio's such as Jane Doe case and her mistreatment by her parents. Its almost insane how people can force themselves to block out traumatic experiences to where we can forget them.
Yeah. So. That article was like 80 pages long.
I think a whole group of scientists/psychologists are necessary when publishing a case study. You can't just take one person's word for it, as it explained in the beginning about Freud, Wilbur, Bettelheim, and Money. They ALL had tremendous flaws in their studies. They did not do all the research necessary to really take what they said seriously. And they were called out on it later for doing so.
In my opinion I don't know if it is alright to try to make a person regain his/her lost memory if they weren't comfortable with it. Sometimes we are more happy if we don't know certain things
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