spunky

psych is also preeminently quantitative, particularly in north america. heck, we even have our own PhD programs focused solely on quantitative methods and data analysis. qualitative methods are much more the realm of counselling psychology and whatnot, but in experimental psych (social/personality/cognitive/bio/neuro) and a lot of clinical work in psych, research = statistics. although i never knew PoliSci also had such a quantitative bent. now a lot of things makes sense in terms of the number of PoliSci students who would sign up for many of our advanced research methods/statistics courses

i think a lot of undergrads who are just getting ready to apply for graduate school sort of jump in the bandwagon of being accepted into their program of choice without looking at the pragmatic implications of what is going to happen after they graduate. i get too many RAs or hopeful undergrads coming to my office asking about graduate school and what is life like and what to look for in terms of programs or potential PIs, etc. and my first question is always something like: "well... but do you know how you're gonna pay for it?" and although it's not a sexy question and makes you seem cold and calculating, gosh it can save you so much stress and heartbreak. i know too many smart, motivated graduate students taking jobs way below their skill level who are barely surviving... and all because they didn't look at the numbers before signing up for a program! if you just love, love the program but the funding is not enough, you need a plan B... like, can you live with family? can you make your commute cheaper? etc. a little bit of planning can take you a long way.

FUNDING. there's no point in accepting an offer from an awesome program if you'll be in financial slavery for the next few decades of your life.

i'm not sure why having these classes would be considered a hindrance. i also have a BSc in a 'hard science' and moved to psychology/education. if i go to a class/discussion where it feels like the level is gonna be low i immediately think "hellooooo GPA booster!" plus you know it's the one class where you don't actually have to do much to ace it and allocate that time to do research or play minecraft or just do something else. if you feel you're not getting much from the discussion, then just use that time to do more research yourself. you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you're getting credit for a graduate class that requires minimal effort!

i fail to see why people are freaking out over this. who has the time to go over 100s of applications? i mean, profs themselves sometimes don't even have the time to glance over the grades of their own students! Clinical Psych over here got more than 300 applications. Counselling Psych was also close to 300 for the MA. you can bet your brownies that no prof is gonna go over 300 applications looking for 'the one'. there has to be some sort of systematic process that lets you filter out say 90% of the applicants or so. just to cover my rear end here i'll say... i'm pretty sure that in some departments (maybe mine, maybe not) there could (or could not) be some sort of.. you know... hypothetical 'checklist' which a hypothetical someone (or group of someones who is/are hypothetically not profs) use to create these hypothetical 'yes' and 'no' piles. and only the 'yes' pile hypothetically makes it to the profs. such is the nature of the beast in another surprising development: graduate students can also be reviewers of manuscripts being submitted for publication. yes, the possibility exists for a lowly PhD student to end up rejecting the manuscript of some hot-shot researcher if the adivsor of said PhD student is falling behind his/her reviews and decides his/her PhD student could benefit from wasting a weekend going over a backlog of manuscripts. i know i've looked at my fair share of manuscripts throughout my years in graduate school.

wait... so the LOLcatz videos i watch at 2am instead of my dissertation are not a good use of my time!? D:

aw... thanks! i'm all about keepin' it real here! speaking of "keepin' it real"... the evidence is starting to point towards the fact the email *might* be legit. i'm on my way to become an online sensation! i'll be like...like... like the Alex from Target of Psychometrics!

hello. today i received this email (supposedly from SAGE publishing) about an article i submitted and got published during the summer. i dunno what to make of it... it sounds fishy to me so i wanna see if other people have received something similar (i'll remove some parts to conceal personal info/stuff): the part that makes me think this is a fake is that they call my article a "highly read" one. the fact of the matter is that it's a somewhat technical article and i would only expect maybe... i dunno, 1 or 2 people to care about it? plus i think fake journals tend to use those loaded terms to catch the attention of unsuspecting new authors. has anyone else got an email like this? We’re writing to you now as representatives of Video Editorial and with the consent of the Journals publishing team at SAGE Publications. SAGE is on the verge of launching subject Video Collections for the worldwide library market in support of higher education and research. Commercial launch for the first phase of these Collections will be in April 2015, and these Video products will be made available via SAGE’s already established SAGE Knowledge product. One major stream of content for each Video Collection are videos summarizing highly-read published journal articles, which will be incredibly useful research cases for students in your field. Given your expertise in this field, we’re writing to enquire if you would like to produce a video for our Media & Communication Video Collection. We notice that you were the lead author of a highly-read article entitled A Cautionary Note on the Use of the Vale and Maurelli Method to Generate Multivariate, Nonnormal Data for Simulation Purposes published in Educational and Psychological Measurement. Might you be interested in creating a brief, 5-10-minute video summarizing some of the key aspects of this article for students and researchers? We’re looking to have supplied video to SAGE by XXX at the latest, so we’d be very grateful if you would confirm your interest as soon as possible. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions! Thank you so much in advance for your involvement; we look forward to hearing from you and hope that this email precipitates interest in SAGE Video! Yours sincerely, Michael Carmichael & Rachael LeBlond Video Editorial Department SAGE Publications Inc.

i think it freaked me out majorly because i had this super-idealized version of what universities in developed countries are and my undergrad uni didn't quite measure up. i also was completely unfamiliar to the concept of a 'Bible Belt' and what it entailed. i was born and raised Catholic. all my elementary and high school teachers were nuns. but none of them made a big fuss about any of the issues i see brought forward over and over again by people who advocate a literal interpretation of the Bible. heck, i learnt how to put a condom on from a nun! (yes, a nun as sex ed teacher was the source of countless nightmares ). but for some reason there was this implicit understanding that what we learned during catechism kind of only applied to religion and not the real world. nobody really questioned it. it wasn't until i moved to North America that i did realize this was an issue for many people... to the point that they even considered relevant to bring it up in class. in a public, non-religious university. and what scared me the most was that a substantial number of students agreed and were OK with it. that kind of made me wonder whether i had made the right move in switching countries until i realized it was *me* who was actually living in the twilight zone and the more i moved away from the Bible Belt and towards a big city, the more 'normal' things seemed.

graduate school, all the way. i went to a freakin' small liberal arts college in the middle of freakin' nowhere in the 'Bible Belt of Canada'. i met people there who literally had never left their hometown. EVER. i remember the first day in a Sociology 101 class the prof was explaining some social myths like how what we call a 'traditional family' is a relatively new invention or that people lived longer before (which is a lie, given the advances we have in medicine today). then this girl raises her hand and says "oh, but long ago people used to live like 100s of years!" the prof was like "oh really... like where? or who?" and the girl said "like Methuselah", took out her bible and quoted it. my first week of classes. my 2nd week in Canada. it was like the twilight zone.

to the best of my understanding (both for doing work in Education and Psychology Departments) MEd/EdS/EdD are not geared towards making you a researcher. they're more applied programs for people willing to work outside academia so the research component is not as strong as within an traditional MA/PhD stream. that could place you at a disadvantage since you will not be able to show a PhD admission committee that you're capable of independent research, luring in grant money, etc. HOWEVER (and that's why i used italics on could) i think you can easily overcome this if you make research and publishing a priority while in graduate school. it's hard to believe that an admission committee would be willing to pass on a candidate with publications in high-quality journals just because (s)he has an Education degree instead of a more traditional MA/PhD research-focused degree. but yeah, without that publication/research aspect i could see an admission committee in Psychology looking at you suspiciously. in my experience (so take this with a grain of salt), i've seen it's more difficult to make the transition form Education to Psychology rather than from Psychology to Education (mostly in terms of departmental policies/bureaucracy. not necessarily the materials covered or the areas being taught). i have no clue why but after years of having a double-appointment in both Psych and Ed departments, going to AERA and APA conferences i've come to realize Psych peepz look at Ed peepz somewhat different.... and not in a good way, lol.

uhm... i really don't think this is the case.i requested a total of 9 references from my profs (i applied to 3 programs and each needed 3 references) and they were submitted promptly and efficiently. maybe this is just your experience?

may i interest you in one of the classics, Casella & Berger's Statistical Inference? it's a pretty awesome book

nothing to add. just really wanted to emphasize this.

wouldn't it be possible for you to start wandering around other people's labs/projects, see if something interests you and jump in? that's what i did and my adivsor was oblivious to it until work i did in another lab became an intrinsic part of my thesis. it was more like "hey, Dr. X! i see Dr. Y is doing this awesome stuff and she gave me the OK to hang around her lab.. just giving you the headz up!"

this is the 3rd question about methods/statistics in psychology that we've got in this forum. i think we should open shop here as a free, hands-on statistical consulting...thingy.

well a 'moderation' is an interaction between two variables so the [condition X moderator ] term would give you what you want. so yeah, make an interaction between the two and that goes in your model.

OK… although I do think that maybe the way Eigen expressed that came out a little too harsh, the point being made (along with juilletmercredi’s) is still very, very VERY valid. I remember sometime last year I was watching Shark Tank (yeah I do watch crappy TV. Sue me ) and one of the ladies there (Barbara Corcoran) had this sob story (but with a GREAT message) about how one of the toughest lessons she learned in business was realizing when to let go. It was some sort of business venture she started and put a lot of effort and money into it but never quite panned out. And she kept trying and trying but realized that if she kept on pursuing it, she would end up broke. So she pulled the plug and killed the business. A career as an adjunct is like that. Heck, a lot of stuff in life is like that. Life is not fair, and people rarely end up doing what they love all the time. Sometimes you need compromise and tag along a job that you hate while you look for something better. Or maybe “pay your dues” eating instant ramen soup and pinching pennies to pay the rent during graduate school (and probably a good chunk of your post-PhD life) for the expectation of a better position down the line. Times are tough out there and we no longer have the privilege to sit around waiting for the magical tenure-track position to appear and propel us into academic stardom. Maybe you could do that in the past (I doubt it but I didn’t live in the past so who knows), but the point is this is the world we live in and these are the cards we have been dealt. Neither you, nor I nor anyone in this forum is going to be able to reverse the for-profit model of North American universities. It’s here to stay and lamenting it doesn’t help anybody. And if MOOCs become a viable alternative I could very well see even adjunct positions disappearing in favour of online-only classes. They key here is learning to adapt and look for a strategy of how you’re gonna make the best of your life, whether it’s inside academia or outside. And now that I’ve stepped down of my soapbox… have I mentioned just how MAJORLY AWESOME Quantitative Psychology is and how much more likely to are to find an academic (or non-academic) job in that area?

i like this plan! i especially like the fact that you're willing to review your regression knowledge. understanding regression in and out is very important because there are many "regression ideas" in the more advanced methods that you will learn (we were actually talking about something similar here ). i feel like sometimes people learn their methods by "going through the motions", so to speak, without stopping to actually think what exactly they are doing. and the biggest strength you'll have as a quant is that you'll be able to take any standard method that you know and adapt it to any type of data you're faced with. the analysis of real-life data is usually a lot more complicated (and interesting) than what you learn in your courses, but if you have a solid understanding of the theory behind the methods, then it becomes a lot easier. i... will have to defer this question to people from other areas. i know people in Social/Personality can be pretty savvy methodologists as well. many cannot run experiments due to the nature of their subject of study so they rely on pretty sophisticated statistics to establish "causal" (notice the " " please) claims about their data (cue in Judea Pearl and the Neyman-Rubin causal model). as a quant, however, it *is* sort of important that you're able to land your ideas about complex statistical methodologies in more applied settings so being proficient in a more 'substantive' (as opposed to purely methodological) area is ideal. mine is education/econ (particularly how they relate to the labour market) but yours can be anything you like.

this is the 2nd statistics/methodology question from a psychology (or social science) person that we get in the span of just a few days. if a 3rd question comes along we're gonna need to open shop here!

sure it is. maybe your prof is doing this so you can see the connection because Psychology has a tradition of teaching ANOVA and Regression as if they were separate things (cue in Cronbach's 1957 article on the 2 disciplines of scientific psychology) but the emphasis on teaching methods courses has lately been on helping students see the connections (like ANOVA is a special type of multiple regression, the general linear model is a specific instance of the generalIZED linear models and they're all specific instances of structural equation models which is itself a family of techniques under the umbrella of latent variable models). anyhoo, just make sure you code your things correctly (remember you always need one code less because one of the levels of the factor becomes the reference) and you're good to go.

or, as it is better known, a one-way ANOVA.

even teh jobz come and find you in gradcafe if you're a quant!

HA! I KNEW MY FIELD WAS THE FIELD TO BE IN!

well.. it depends on what you mean by "fairly proficient". i've been using R for almost a decade and i still hesitate to call myself "proficient" in it because of all the new stuff and undiscovered thingies i keep on finding about it. i mean i was not kidding when i said you *had* to learn R. SAS or STATA are pretty powerful and useful as well. R i just... well, it's quickly becoming *the* standard statistical programming environment (or as the NYTimes called it the "lingua franca" of data analysts http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 ) but i guess if you feel more comfortable with SAS nobody's gonna throw a fit about it. you just reduce the potential pool of users who might find your stuff useful but they may see it in SAS and say "oh darn, i'll just wait for someone to translate it into R". or something like that. as you can imagine, the more programming languages you're 'fluent' in, the more influential as a scholar you can be because you can reach more people. if you have time to kill until gradschool i would not only encourage you to learn R but maybe to have a deeper look at areas where Quant Psych people work. Structural Equation Modeling/Item Response Theory are two VERY big ones and the software of choice for those (and most latent variable analyses) is Mplus, which is a lot simpler (but also a lot LESS flexible) than R. R still cannot do everything Mplus does but it's getting there through the use of the packages 'lavaan' and 'OpenMX'. although you'd probably be expected to be proficient in Mplus as well (i personally don't like it but i can use it without any major hassle). in terms of resources i'm usually a little low on those because i've found that there really is no better way to learn R than forcing yourself to use it and struggle with it. like the other guy in my program started by taking all his basic statistics homeworks and assignments (all done in SPSS) and re-doing them all in R just googling one thing at a time (e.g. 'how to do a t-test in R?' 'how do to an ANOVA in R?') he told me the first assignment took him about 3 hours (one of which was just figuring out how to read-in the data). but then the next assignment took him less... and less... and less until he became sufficiently comfortable with it to be able to keep on doing all his future assignments in R. i know people really like Andy Field's "Discover Statistics with R" (or something like that, i don't know the exact name) because of how chatty and down-to-earth it is. so maybe you can have a look at it and see whether you like it? but, in all honesty, Google is probably your best resource and you just ask google everything you want to do. since R has exploded in popularity, there are plenty of tutorials and blogs and youtube videos that teach you a lot of the basics.