Math/stats?

[EPC]

I am enrolled in an MSc program in the UK this fall but I'm starting to worry about the math/stats component. I plan to become a counselling psychologist and have a background in the arts - my brain simply does not do numbers. The MSc is simply a requirement for the counselling doctorate program I hope to get into. 

When I read research papers I'm a bit bowled over by the amount of numbers in those things. How number-intensive is psych research? And is it silly for me to be concerned about this or SHOULD I be worried?

[spunky]

In my experience, psychological research tends to be pretty number-heavy, particularly if you’re aiming to publish in the top journals. The whole Crisis of Replicability brouhaha alongside with the movement towards Open Science and is placing a renewed emphasis on proper methodology and statistics. But it does not necessarily *have* to be. I mean, there are some pretty strong published papers out there where the statistics and number-crunching is not particularly complicated because they have very powerful research designs with strong protocols. In my experience, the sophistication of statistical analysis tends to be inversely related to the strength of the research design. The weaker your design, the more advanced the statistical analysis has to be to account for it. But the “mathematization” of psychology (and I guess the social sciences in general) has been going on for a while, particularly with the advent of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, which definitely pushed it forward.

If your emphasis is on clinical work more than research, however, I would say a moderate statistical background is at least necessary to be able to evaluate research papers and see whether the claims they make are substantiated or not. But I’d definitely say that, in those cases, you don’t need to be as proficient in statistics as if you were mostly a research psychologist. 

Still, though, there are programs (mostly in counselling psych, not so much in clinical) that prefer the more qualitative approach to research and the statistics part is kept at a minimum so that could be something to explore if math/stats is not your thing?

Edited July 3, 2017 by spunky

[COGSCI]

14 hours ago, EPC said:

I am enrolled in an MSc program in the UK this fall but I'm starting to worry about the math/stats component. I plan to become a counselling psychologist and have a background in the arts - my brain simply does not do numbers. The MSc is simply a requirement for the counselling doctorate program I hope to get into. 

When I read research papers I'm a bit bowled over by the amount of numbers in those things. How number-intensive is psych research? And is it silly for me to be concerned about this or SHOULD I be worried?

Increasing number of researchers are now incorporating qualitative methods so you can look into that since it is not stats. You do need to know the basics of quantitative methods for PhD though. It is not like calculus and most of it is done through a program (SPSS or SAS).