Summary Table: Key Studies of Explanations for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) (DP IB Psychology) : Revision Note

Key Studies Summary of Explanations for MDD

How do I use these studies in an exam question on this topic?

• IB students have a lot of content to cover (particularly students taking Psychology at Higher Level) so the purpose of this revision resource is to slim down and streamline the number of studies you need per topic/exam question

• Remember that all Paper 2 questions are ERQs (Extended Response Questions) which are worth 22 marks, take an hour to write and need to be rich in critical thinking

• The exam question command term will be one of the following:‘Evaluate’, ‘Discuss’, ‘Contrast’ or ‘To what extent’ 

• Each command term requires you to answer the question in slightly different ways, using the content as shown in the summary table above i.e. specific studies per topic/question

• In order to slim down the content you need to revise you can see above how some of the studies can be used for more than one potential exam question

• McGuffin et al. (1996), Caspi et al. (2003) and Riso et al. (2006) can be used to answer more than one potential exam question so you may decide to keep all of these studies and ‘throw away’ any studies which you find that you don’t need to revise