- Social: Controls over variables in lab experiments can lead to replicability and high reliability. However bias in questionnaires raises issues of validity. Can be criticised for not being able to generalise findings to real world.
- Cognitive: One of the most scientific. Adopts scientific method in explaining how we process info. Experiments and controls mean replicability and reliability. Controls use to establish causality.
- Biological: Synaptic transmission, brain scans, all objective and scientific help increase credibility. However some methods, ie psychodynamic approach and correlations (cause and effect cannot be drawn) reduce the scientific status. Being scientific, however, leaves psychology open to reductionism.
- Learning: Explicit focus on behaviourism on the observable behaviour that can be scientifically studied and objectively recorded.
- Clinical: Medical model dominates area, which is a highly scientific model – uses empirical research methods. Progressed development of brain imaging techniques.
- Child: Strange situation adopts many procedural elements – behaviour is coded and confirmed w/ inter-rater reliability, highly standardised and controlled and only observable behaviours recorded. Evolutionary theories are however speculative and lack empirical evidence, unable to be falsified.
