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Ocd Case Studies

Decent Essays
Rachman (2004) outlines a case study of a patient with OCD that provides evidence of Hypervigilance. The patient was had anxiety about catching diseases, specifically, another person’s blood. In public, she would persistently look around for evidence of blood- plasters, bandages, dark coloured spots on clothing. As she focused on these so intensely, she was able to recall them years later. A strength of case studies as a method of gathering data is that they produce rich data. This data is extremely detailed as it focuses on the whole person and their behaviour. This is a strength as the data will give a detailed account of why someone may have OCD and what the characteristics are in their case. The use of case study permits investigation…show more content…
Hoaken, 1980). They discovered a strong concordance rate of 50-60% between Monozygotic twins and anxiety disorders such as OCD. They also found when OCD run in family, they inherit the general nature of it, but not the exact same symptoms. As the concordance rate varied and wasn’t 100%, it suggests that OCD could be partly genetic and environmental. A limitation of twin studies is that they are not representative of other children. Twins are rare, and there may be some other special or unusual features of MZ twins besides their genetic similarities Another limitation of twin studies is that they may attract attention and get treated the same way even if they had different personalities; they may be mistaken from one another. This may cause them to start behaving more like each other than other brothers or sisters do. Again, twins generally are brought up the same by their parents, which could be a confounding variable when analysing twin studies. A strength of twin studies is that they are an example of a natural-occurring variable: MZ twins share 100% of their genes, whereas DZ twins share about 50%. As the researcher doesn’t manipulate the variables themselves, the risk of researcher bias is
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