Doctor Money Case Study

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Doctor Money’s research with David Reimer can be classified as research motivated by exploration. At the time sex change was not well known or accepted in the culture of the Canadian society. It was not very often heard of a male or female changing their gender and going through sex change operation. Upon Doctor Money hearing from the twin’s parents, he found it as an excellent case to explore his theory on sex change. The exploratory method uses occurs when a researcher examines a new study, which in this case would be sex change. Exploratory theories are a source of grounded theory when a researcher is trying to break into a new field. As explained in our textbook exploratory studies tend to have three purposes. They are to satisfy
At first Doctor Money explained to the parents to nurture David as a girl. That seemed to work well until David began to notice changes to his body in a more masculine form. Doctor Money took a more physical approach and used genital differences between boys and girls to explain the difference. The twins were forced to strip naked and Doctor Money would ask David what the difference was between his brother’s genitals and his. Doctor Money believed that David would view himself as a girl when he would see that he does not have a penis, and that he was closer to being a girl as he just had skin in the crotch area. Nomothetic causality assumes that a casual relationship will occur. There are three core principles for nomothetic causality to occur in social research. The first principle is that variables must be correlated, the cause takes place before the effect and the variables must be nonspurious. A correlation occurs when one variable changes and it effects the other variable. In Doctor Money’s research, the two variables would have been the child’s sex and how it changes in regards to the way the child is being nurtured. His research did not have a correlation as he assumed that if a child was nurtured from birth to be raised as a girl, and then the child would grow up as a girl. However with Bruce that did not take place as he knew he was a by due to his masculine body changes around the age of 12. Doctor Money’s research did not seem to have be an example of nomothetic causality as it lacked to connect to the

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