I have a question for any Quantitative Psychology people here.
Which "substantive" fields of psychology has your PhD research and/or career focused on, aside from pure quantitative stuff (publishing in methodology journals, etc.)?
Which "substantive" fields of psychology do you find yourself collaborating in most frequently, and what is your role in these collaborations?
For my PhD I am considering either quantitative psychology or bio-neuro-physio psychology. I'll admit, my passion is somewhat more for biopsych, but biopsych has one of the worst outlooks among the different areas of psychology, and quantitative has by far the best. And I do actually enjoy stats, I could definitely see myself as a quantitative psychologist, either in an academic role or working for, say, a standardized testing company.
The problem is that I'm not sure what my research would look like in quantitative psych. Health Psychology and Social Psych seem to be common "substantive" areas for quant psychologists to work in. I'm not interested in social psych, and health psych sounds interesting to the extent that it overlaps with biostatistics/epidemiology type stuff, but I've never actually had a class in health psych and would be a bit afraid to jump into a PhD where health psych was a major part of my specialization with so little background in it or understanding of what it is all about.
I am a very detail-oriented person so I suppose I would probably be able to get really into the measurement / test construction issues of the psychometrics part of quantpsych. But it is important for me to feel that I'm doing something important, and I'm not sure if I'd get that from simply working on building better personality scales or the like. Personality psych doesn't interest me and it seems like psychometricians in academic settings do usually study personality as their area of substantive interest. (Those in industry, obviously, work on a lot of standardized tests, which is different).
I'm also wondering to what extent behavioral genetics could be an area of significant overlap with quantitative psych. Obviously behavioral genetics is very quantitative, but I'm not sure how much overlap it would specifically have with quantitative psychology.
Any advice? Thanks in advance.
Which "substantive" fields of psychology has your PhD research and/or career focused on, aside from pure quantitative stuff (publishing in methodology journals, etc.)?
Which "substantive" fields of psychology do you find yourself collaborating in most frequently, and what is your role in these collaborations?
For my PhD I am considering either quantitative psychology or bio-neuro-physio psychology. I'll admit, my passion is somewhat more for biopsych, but biopsych has one of the worst outlooks among the different areas of psychology, and quantitative has by far the best. And I do actually enjoy stats, I could definitely see myself as a quantitative psychologist, either in an academic role or working for, say, a standardized testing company.
The problem is that I'm not sure what my research would look like in quantitative psych. Health Psychology and Social Psych seem to be common "substantive" areas for quant psychologists to work in. I'm not interested in social psych, and health psych sounds interesting to the extent that it overlaps with biostatistics/epidemiology type stuff, but I've never actually had a class in health psych and would be a bit afraid to jump into a PhD where health psych was a major part of my specialization with so little background in it or understanding of what it is all about.
I am a very detail-oriented person so I suppose I would probably be able to get really into the measurement / test construction issues of the psychometrics part of quantpsych. But it is important for me to feel that I'm doing something important, and I'm not sure if I'd get that from simply working on building better personality scales or the like. Personality psych doesn't interest me and it seems like psychometricians in academic settings do usually study personality as their area of substantive interest. (Those in industry, obviously, work on a lot of standardized tests, which is different).
I'm also wondering to what extent behavioral genetics could be an area of significant overlap with quantitative psych. Obviously behavioral genetics is very quantitative, but I'm not sure how much overlap it would specifically have with quantitative psychology.
Any advice? Thanks in advance.