Statistics/Social Science Fields?

[SocialQuant]

Hi all,

I'm a rising senior this year double majoring in Statistics and Psychology. I really love both of these fields and want to pursue doing statistical research in the social sciences in graduate school (specifically masters programs). The only problem is I'm not sure what programs or field would best combine statistics and social science for me.

From what I've seen, most psychology/stats programs are about psychometrics which mainly concerns working in the field of education which I have no background in and know very little about. I've taken a class on networks and social network analysis and I'm very very interested in that, but unsure what graduate programs would specialize in that or what kind of career that would lead to. I excelled in my Psychology Research Methods courses and really like doing that kind of research, but there are very few quantitative psychology masters programs.

Does anybody have any advice for potential career options and for strong masters programs? Again I'm really interested in applying statistical modeling and methods to study human behavior and population trends. Thanks for your help!

[TeX4]

economics might work for you.

[statscan9]

Sounds like you want to do economics. Unfortunately, grad school in economics generally requires an undergrad in economics, with many specific courses you have to take. Maybe talk to an prof in the economics department at your school to see if they can recommend a course of action that will get you into a graduate program without adding years to your undergrad.

[eternallyephemeral]

Hi! Aside from economics, you may want to look into marketing graduate programs, which have a quantitative side and a consumer behavior side, both of which you would be qualified for with a background in stats and psychology.

As well, organizational behavior and industrial/organizational psychology uses a lot of stats, and not just for psychometrics (which is about more than education - its also about market research, analyzing HR/employee data, and doing data analysis on any of the psychology subfields that collect questionnaire information, like personality, quantiative, I/O psych, and social). I/O psych and org behavior also use social network analysis often, and they especially want students with strong stats and coding backgrounds. A lot of people from these areas go on (aside from academic positions) to data scientist positions, people analytics teams (like the one at google!), and consulting jobs.

Population trends would be more of an epidemiology or public health thing, but you could look into business analytics, industrial/organizational psychology, organizational behavior, or marketing masters degrees.

There's lots of options for combining these two fields. Good luck!

[cyberwulf]

University of Washington Statistics is home to CSSS (https://www.csss.washington.edu/) and offers a Masters degree with a Social Science track. At the very least, it's a starting point where you might be able to identify some keywords to search for other similar programs.

Alternatively, you might look into sociology programs, some of which are quite quantitative. 

Edited August 28, 2017 by cyberwulf
Added sociology mention

[StatsG0d]

Economics is your best bet and you definitely do not need an undergrad degree in Econ to do it. Most will ask that you have at least taken undergraduate micro and macro though. They are more interested in your math ability.