Kashfa Ahmed
ENGW3308
Musselman
Unit 1 Draft 1
APA Format
09/10/2014 Word Count: 1291
Defining psychology has been a dilemma ever since the emergence of this field in the scientific society. Research in psychology follows the scientific method except the manipulation of abstract variables does not always lead to concrete results. There are many things to consider like the variability amongst subjects, internal validity and the inability to generalize results to different populations along with the specific guidelines that must be followed in order to deem the experiment as ethical. Since psychology
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It highlights various ways of designing an indigenous scales and manipulating Western ones so that they become more culturally appropriate. For example in this study, translating the Interpersonal Scale to Urdu, which is the native language of Pakistan, was a good strategy. It allowed participants to understand the scale better and answer questions comfortably. The study followed all the ethical guidelines required in a psychological test which is pretty commendable since it is difficult to do that in a society that might have a different perception of ethics altogether. It also highlighted gender differences, which is extremely important even in small populations like Pakistani university students. The fact that it was conducted in a public university should be noted because public universities tend to be more conservative than private institutions. It did a good job of explaining the five components of social intelligence (social manipulation, social facilitation, social empathy, social adaptability and extroversion) in relation to gender differences. I feel like an indigenous scale like the SIS would be very useful in pointing out biases in this area of a particular culture or