DIfference in Quantitative Psychology Programs

[Scalia]

I'm interesting in pursuing quantitative psychology and I know these type of programs are housed in both regular psychology programs and in educational psychology programs. What are the differences in employment opportunities from these different programs. Are quantitative psychologists in demand regardless of the department they come from?

[neuropsych76]

I'm interesting in pursuing quantitative psychology and I know these type of programs are housed in both regular psychology programs and in educational psychology programs. What are the differences in employment opportunities from these different programs. Are quantitative psychologists in demand regardless of the department they come from?

I've only seen quant psych programs in psychology departments but I would assume if the training is the same then the demand would be the same.

However, quant psych in education departments might be more geared towards assessment whereas quant psych in psych departments is more geared towards research.

[spunky]

I'm interesting in pursuing quantitative psychology and I know these type of programs are housed in both regular psychology programs and in educational psychology programs. What are the differences in employment opportunities from these different programs. Are quantitative psychologists in demand regardless of the department they come from?

i'm actually studying that right now, and it wholly depends on what you want to do. in my university (UBC in Canada) you can either streamline it to focus only in assessment (taking more courses on program evaluations or the use and interpretation of psychological tests) or you can focus on more quantiative analysis (which is the area i'm focused on). i work both with the education and psychology departments and i think i'm getting the best of both worlds because from the education department i get the applied how-to-use-this-thing approach and the quantitative psychology one gets me the why-i-do-it... but i've basically taken the same courses in both areas with one exception: the education version usually has a heavier focus on psychometrics (if it makes sense to you: classical test theory, item response theory, multilevel scaling, etc.) which i do not find in the quant psych program...

in terms of employment opportunities, even if you visit the APA's website you can see that quantitative psychology programs have the highest employability prospects (too many people need us and we dont graduate enough PhDs)... although when it comes down to it, i dont think anyone makes the distinction between whether you come from an education of a psychology program (unless you wanna teach, in which i know for a fact psychology departments prefer to hire psychology graduates)

[juilletmercredi]

I wish I had learned about quantitative psychology before I went to grad school, because that's what I would've done (I'm in social psychology with a very heavy quant/methods focus). Quant psychologists are in very high demand, not only in academic departments (if you are willing and qualified to teach statistics and research methods...your chances of getting a job go way up. Seems like every job posting asks for that, and seems like no one actually wants to do it besides me, lol) but in industry too.

AS an additional note, ETS has a summer program for quant and educational psychologists interested in psychometrics and assessment - might be interesting. Also, APA has a whole section for those interested in quant psych: http://www.apa.org/research/tools/quantitative/index.aspx

[Scalia]

Like I said in an earlier post, I'm trying to distinguish between the differences in opportunities and job prospects between quant. programs in psychology and educational psychology programs. On the APA task force page they have comprehensive lists of both types of programs but don't really offer any guidance on which program is appropriate for distinct job paths. Unfortunately, the field is small enough that most of my professors have confessed that they don't have a clue about the differences in the programs.

I'm trying to decide which type of program to apply to in the fall but I have the issue of not really knowing what I want to do after grad school. I can most definitely see myself in an academic job but yet would be very open to an industry job if the right topic and job came along. Again, if anyone has an idea on which program would be the best all around degree for primary academics and yet also industry, please feel free to share.

[spunky]

Like I said in an earlier post, I'm trying to distinguish between the differences in opportunities and job prospects between quant. programs in psychology and educational psychology programs. On the APA task force page they have comprehensive lists of both types of programs but don't really offer any guidance on which program is appropriate for distinct job paths. Unfortunately, the field is small enough that most of my professors have confessed that they don't have a clue about the differences in the programs.

I'm trying to decide which type of program to apply to in the fall but I have the issue of not really knowing what I want to do after grad school. I can most definitely see myself in an academic job but yet would be very open to an industry job if the right topic and job came along. Again, if anyone has an idea on which program would be the best all around degree for primary academics and yet also industry, please feel free to share.

thing is it really depends where you wanna focus on and i think you can get a very good sense of that by reading what i would say are the two most famous or prestigious journals in the field for quantitative methodology for these two areas in the social sciences: the journal of educational measurment and psychometrika. educational measurement has a lot of applied stuff, easy to grasp for even non-technically oriented people. in psychometrika, unless you have a very solid understanding of at the very least 2nd- or 3rd- year college calculus, linear algebra, and probablity &stats i'd say you're gonna miss half of what the authors say... it's the applied VS theoretical perspective.... as i said before, one main differences i have seen while taking courses in both departments is that i dont think quantitative psychology programs necessarily expose you to a lot of psychometrics (item response theory, scale development and equating, principles of computer adaptive testing, etc...) whereas educational measurement programs do not have a lot of the underpinnings of advanced data analysis (hierarchical linear models, random regression trees, etc...) as an example of sorts, my education program has just recently opened a course in multilevel modeling which the psychology dept had been offering for at least 5 years already.

i also think it's easier to find non-academic jobs if you follow through educational measurement programs because there's a lot of money that gets invested in education (and, by extension you get a lot of funding) whereas quantiative psychology tends to dwell more on the abstract and advanced techniques of data analysis that may or may not get you results that other people can use afterwards... if you go to an NCME (National Council of Measurment in Education) conference like the one that happened in New Orleans this year (a shout out to anyone who went!!! ) you'll see there's even quite a few people into policy analysis and program development doing some smart "head-hunting" of grads to see if they can work the numbers for them for whatever research results they wanna present before congress... however, the only people i've seen in the annual general meetings of the psychometric society are academics...

in any case, conclusion is it really depends what you wanna do in your career. the fact that you're in a quantitative psychology program will not preclude you from learning psychometrics if you want to, or being in an educational measurement program will not stop you from dealing with the subtleties of mathematical statistics (which is my case) ... one thing i do know for sure, however, is that a quant psych program is gonna require from you a considerably stronger background in mathematics/statistics/computer programming than an educational measurement one... and, a word of advice... if you're not familiar with R or SAS, ditch SPSS and start working with those right now (or practice on any other object-oriented programming language), especially for quant psych because SPSS just wont do anymore at the grad level for the more advanced techniques...

if you dont mind my asking, have you considered focusing on your advisor or area of research more than the program iteself? what are you research interests? what kind of exposure do you have to quantitative analysis? what kind of questions are you more interested in asking? the truth is that there is simply so much overlap between these two programs that, by the end of the day, you can end up doing one or the other one and be equally as good...

[Behavioral]

ive read that psychologists w/ quantitive backgrounds are in much need and is extremely marketable when apply to Ph.D programs. Heres the link

I still want to see hard evidence (i.e., placement records) over the years for Quant Psychologists. The claim made by the ASU professor quoted in the article doesn't quite convince me ("ASU has five PhDs graduating this year in quantitative psychology and all five already have wonderful jobs that they got quickly," says Aiken.) -- I want to know what the actual five jobs are. Most people who are going into Quant Psych, I would imagine, still want to be academics; working for a textbook publishing company isn't quite the romantic job one would hope for with a Ph.D.

[Scalia]

I agree with the above post. I know the industry prospects for quant psychologists must be good, but I want to know what the academic prospects are for quant. psychologists.

[spunky]

ok... i would have hoped for someone else to weigh in in this post and share his or her experience with us... but since i seem to be the *ONLY* one who's actually in the field of quantiative psychology/psychometrics AND contributing to this post, i think there are a few things to dispel.

first things first. if anyone out there considers that working in the industry as opposed to the academia is somehow less desirable or just "not as good" or... what was the term? oh, yes, not as "r-o-m-a-n-t-i-c" for whatever reason, you are only showing a horrible lack of understanding of how this area of psychology works and you're gonna bang your head against several walls before you realise that. just as with any other job, there are places in the industry (yes, i said it) that are FAR superior than any university setting and there are ones that, for lack of a better term, just plain SUCK!. example of a good one and a bad one that i experienced first hand as an intern:

the (REALLY) good one: pearson (as in perason publishing). now, i know pearson manages a lot of internships and from the guys and gals i met there, some loved it and some hated it but one thing i can tell everyone was that working for their Pearson Assessment and Information Research group was a real pleasure. first of all it was a (surprisingly good) paid intership. you get to join one or several research groups that happen to be working on problems that both match your interests and those of the company. in my case, i'm working very hard to become an expert in hierarchical linear models so they paired me with people who were into item response theory but lacked the knowledge and expertise of someone who can handle multilevel data. we got to do a lot of fun research and, once we were done with part of our weekly projects, we got to present them to one another in small auditoriums to other geeky people like myself (statisticians, computer scientists, educational measurement specialists, researchers of all sorts, etc.) all throughout the summer. i learned much more doing that than the usual data-analysis i'm sometimes stuck with as an RA at the uni.

the (REALLY) bad one: mcgraw-hill. their CTB intership was really crappy. i did absolutely nothing, worked with people who knew even less than myself and, all in all, i think the only good thing i got from there was how to develop the zen attitude to sruvive 8hrs in an office desk without doing anything.

now, i am not at the post-doc level myself to be able to say that i've worked in a university setting before, but one of the people who graduated from my program and went to work to UF with the hopes of somehow getting into a job that would get him tenure ended up coming back to canada because, as soon as he arrived, he became the go-to stats person for everyone else, so the prof who got him to go and work with him there at UF could do his research while my poor friend was the stats ho' for everyone else in the psych dept.

so, all in all, things can go good or go bad depending on where you end up. i think that probably the best place to work if you're in this area is ETS (Education Testing Service, the people who mind the GREs, remember?) the paycheck's awesome, the felxibility of what you can do is amazing, you have access to EVERYTHING for your research and get to then teach it back to the other people who then get to teach you what they've been working on... and all of this minus the grading!!

H-O-W-E-V-E-R... there is one, VERY, VERY important thing where i really believe Leona Aiken (who's, by the way, a leading figure in the field) got it wrong there on that link that PsychYe added on his/her post... and it's specifically this quote:

"By no means is a math major necessary," Aiken says. Areas within quantitative

psychology vary in the amount of mathematics that is necessary, and students may

boost their math skills in graduate school."

people, that is the biggest piece of BS i have ever read in a while. there are two main areas in the field of quantiative psychology where you can work on...the "soft quant psych" where you become an expert in assessment, using psychometric instruments, assembling batteries of tests, etc and the "hard quant psych"where you work on the hard core mathematical and statistical analysis of data and tackle problems in psychometrics. people, regardless of whether you go in the industry or academia THE JOBS ARE ONLY ON THE HARD SIDE OF QUANTIATIVE PSYCHOLOGY... what they want is statisticians and mathematicians who happen to have an interest in the social sciences, and i know that because i did my B.Sc. in Statistics and i know for a fact that people who go into statistics usually have no desire to do anything in the social sciences. however, things like item response theory or latent variable modelling require a solid understanding of mathematical statistics to get them to work right, so there is a horrible lack of talent which psychology is desperately trying to a solution to by trying to move more people into the hard quantitative psychology. you need to feel comfortable around linear algebra, you need to know a lot of programming (particularly FORTRAN, R, S+ or SAS. SPSS just wont do the trick anymore), you need to understand very well how calculus and multiple integrals work. if you prefer to be on the soft quant psych area be my guest, but keep in mind that those pearly gates of job openings and promises of employability will not materliaze as if you are a hard-core quantiative analyst.

yeah... and i think that's enough for today's rant.

Edited June 30, 2011 by spunky

[Behavioral]

I don't know why you went off with such a belligerent tone.

If you were directing the part about wanting an academic job (over industry) to me, I'll counter that by saying that I gave up going to OSU's Quantitative Psych and CMU's SDS Ph.D. programs this year (both feeding heavily into other Quant Psych and JDM programs) to get into the top Quant Marketing Ph.D. program, just so that I can have a good shot at consulting offers afterwards. Am I open to industry work? Yes. Would I prefer to work in academia? Most definitely. I inquired about academic placements because the author skates through that entire subject in that post.

Also, I'm well aware that soft Quant doesn't do jack to get you a job. Before I looked into Quant Marketing, I was headed towards an Economics Ph.D., and doubled in Joint Math/Econ and Psychology (mainly concentrating on behavioral economics and Bayesian modeling). I quite enjoy conducting my own research, and for me to get a Ph.D. only to be used as a tool or to be pigeonholed into only conducting R&D relevant to a publishing company, that'd be a waste of my time. My prerogative into going into a Ph.D. was to go to academia--I know there are many who want industry jobs, or who don't know what direction they're headed, or even ones that don't know if they even like research enough to continue on with further studies. However, I like to be cognizant of the risks and general probabilities of what options I'll have later.

[Engali]

i'm actually studying that right now, and it wholly depends on what you want to do. in my university (UBC in Canada) you can either streamline it to focus only in assessment (taking more courses on program evaluations or the use and interpretation of psychological tests) or you can focus on more quantiative analysis (which is the area i'm focused on). i work both with the education and psychology departments and i think i'm getting the best of both worlds because from the education department i get the applied how-to-use-this-thing approach and the quantitative psychology one gets me the why-i-do-it... but i've basically taken the same courses in both areas with one exception: the education version usually has a heavier focus on psychometrics (if it makes sense to you: classical test theory, item response theory, multilevel scaling, etc.) which i do not find in the quant psych program...

in terms of employment opportunities, even if you visit the APA's website you can see that quantitative psychology programs have the highest employability prospects (too many people need us and we dont graduate enough PhDs)... although when it comes down to it, i dont think anyone makes the distinction between whether you come from an education of a psychology program (unless you wanna teach, in which i know for a fact psychology departments prefer to hire psychology graduates)

Hey,

I read on the Canadian Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology that UBC offers a PhD in Psychometrics w/ a specialization in I/O Psych, but I couldn't find the program. It seems like the closest program is the Quant Psych program. Do you know if they are related or if I could somehow tailor the Quant program towards a more I/O focus? Also, does your program primarily prepare people for research or does it strike a balance with practice? Thanks for any help you can give me.