There has been a lot of confusion amongst people about what exactly it is that I do/am in school for. (This is understandable; scientist are not know for effective communication with the general public!) Allow me to see if I can clear things up!
Most of the time when I say I'm a psychologist, people think of a clinical or counseling psychologist who sees clients and administers therapy. That is not what Developmental Psychology does. When I graduate, I will not be able to practice therapy. Developmental psych is a research discipline that looks at how people change and, well, develop and the influences that guide that development. We do that through research!
So what is psychological research? Honestly, this is something that I am still trying to figure out myself! Some people think of going to the library and reading when I say 'research.' That is just one step.
The first thing you have to do is come up with a question. Then you have to read a butt load of papers to see if someone has already answered your question and how, how you can do it better/a different way; if no one else has answered it, reading similar things that other people have done can help you figure out what you think the answer might be. These predictions about what the answer will be are called hypotheses (plural of hypothesis...). The process of reading to form your hypotheses is called a literature review. Once you know what is going on in the literature and have formed your hypothesis, you figure out how you are going to answer your question. This is called designing a study; study designs in developmental psych range from true experiments (bringing people/kids into the lab, manipulating the conditions, and seeing what happens), to interviews and questionnaires, to natural observation, and everything in between. The type of study depends on your question. THEN you collect your data. You do your study. After the data is collected you analyze it using a wide variety of statistical techniques. Then you have to figure out what your analysis means. What conclusions can you draw from the stats you found? Were your hypotheses correct or not? So that's the process of doing a study. It can take anywhere from a few months to a few years depending on what you are doing.
After you do a study, you want to share your results! That's kind of the point. You write up a paper. There is a very specific format that you have to follow; basically you are making a case for why what you did is valuable, why you did it the way you did it, and why your analysis and conclusions make sense. The paper then gets submitted to journals where it is either accepted (very rare), rejected (if it's total crap) or is put under review (the most common scenario). When a paper is under review, it is given to other experts in the field, and you get the paper back with their feedback...often this involves harsh criticisms, but the point is to make it better. Hopefully after undergoing the review process it is publishable and makes it into the journal. I should note that even papers that are accepted into journals get reviewed.
And that is what you do for your whole career. Academic psychologists have really broad questions that form the basis of their research. They use individual studies to answer smaller questions that hopefully add up to answers to the bigger questions. This is what I am learning how to do...I'm learning how to learn stuff!
No comments:
Post a Comment