IO Psychology vs. Engineering Psychology

[mtjamieson]

I'm considering both Engineering psych and IO psych for grad school, and I'm looking for a little bit of insight into both of them. I want to do something that's more on the business side of psych. There are very few non-textbooks that I can find on the two subjects.

Does anyone have any experience or insight with these fields? I'm trying to get into some research labs at my school; I'm in my last semester so there's not much open!

Thanks!

[BeingThere]

Go here to learn a bit about I/O psych:

http://www.siop.org/

 

Clemson has a good human factors program (engineering psych).  You can read a bit about it here:  http://www.clemson.edu/psych/grad/phd-hf/

 

They also offer a more standard I/O program, so you can check out each of their programs and it might help you compare/contrast them.

 

I have not run across any books on I/O outside of text books.  But an old textbook on I/O might give you a decent overview of the kinds of issues I/O's deal with.  I have an old textbook by Paul Spector that does a great job of giving a good overview of I/O topics.

 

I will add that I/O as a field deals with a wide range of topics and has traditionally been partitioned into the "I", which covers such topics as selection, training, and job analysis, and the "O" which deals with such topics as motivation, teams, incentives, job satisfactoin and fairness perception.  Both I and O draw on personality and social psych as well as business and management theories.

 

I don't know much about human factors as a field. 

Edited January 14, 2013 by Bren2014

[gnomechomsky22]

I would suggest trying to talk to grad students in both fields. I worked with a graduate student in the I/O lab and while I liked it, I decided Engineering Psychology/Human Factors psychology is the direction I want to go in. I would read as much about the subjects as you can and definitely try to get a position with an undergrad lab. Any and all experience you can get in the lab will be super helpful.

 

As for the books, most of them are textbooks; however, check out "The Atomic Chef" for human factors. I have yet to come across a book for I/O that wasn't a textbook. I would browse around amazon and the library.