• Question: How is working with data different to working with people in psychology?

    Asked by anon-183905 to Tom, Owen, Nathan on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Nathan Hook

      Nathan Hook answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      If you do experiments in psychology (as opposed to say, actual therapy work), you are going to need to work with data. You don’t need to be quick or good at it, but you need to be able to go through the steps (with a textbook), get the results and make sense of it. You need to learn how to spot logical errors, and make sure you don’t use a particular statistical test on some type of data where it’s not really valid to do so.

      In data science, often one can work with ‘big data’ – massive data sets about huge populations (such as all the exam results in England) rather than a small dataset from an experiment. The difference is you can’t do anything ‘by hand’ with big data and have to rely on the using software tools. In some cases, using code to manage big databases.

    • Photo: Tom Gallagher-Mitchell

      Tom Gallagher-Mitchell answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      I agree with Nathan. However to extend this in psychology I would suggest that people are data. By this I mean if we are measuring behaviour such as response times to a stimulus, or answers in a questionnaire they are generated by people and their thoughts and feelings. Even though we translate these to more manageable numbers. This also holds if we look at neuroscience data where we average brain responses across groups of participants. In terms of qualitative data such as interviews, this is all grounded within that participants subjective experience of something so very much from them as an individual.

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