Why Quantitative Psychology?
The term Quantitative psychology may sound a bit strange to some. Whenever I tell people outside of psychology about my field, I get the feeling that psychology is mostly perceived as a qualitative discipline. Although this perception is certainly grounded in reality, it is also the case that psychology has become increasingly focused on quantitative research in the past decades. However, unlike “hard” sciences such as biology and physics, research in psychology faces 2 large challenges: arguably small sample sizes (i.e., anywhere between 20 to 1000), and, more importantly, measurement error.
Sample size: One of the goals of research is to eventually generalize the findings to a larger population. However, this becomes rather tricky when sample sizes are small. This problem that plagues psychology happen mostly due to data collection being time consuming and/or the lack of research funding. Thus, meticulous knowledge of statistics, inferential techniques, and what can and cannot be done given the sample size, becomes cardinal to most psychological research. This problem happens much less in fields such a data science, where essentially the same statistical models are used, but sample size is often a smaller concern due to the wealth of available data.
Measurement error: Measurement error in psychology stems from the fact that psychologists are mostly interested in latent constructs , variables that are not directly measurable, such as personality or intelligence (which remains to this day a highly contentious topic). Since one cannot directly measure personality as one would, say, temperature, statistical knowledge to build tools that accurately measure these latent constructs is essential to the field. After all, all conclusions about a phenomenon would be erroneous if that phenomenon was to be measured incorrectly. This issue is mostly dealt with by the field known as psychometrics , a sub-field of quantitative psychology.
Quantitative psychologists generally tackle such issues in their work. However, for better of for worse, quantitative psychology is probably one of the least popular fields in psychology, and arguably a niche degree. But why is that the case? Well, in my experience, very few students apply to quantitative psychology degrees compared to degrees in clinical psychology, developmental psychology, organizational psychology and so on. The fact is that quantitative psychology as a field is in a bit of an interesting position: math focused individuals tend to choose more fully math related fields such as mathematics degrees or statistics degrees, whereas, individuals more interested in the social sciences and humanities tend to avoid topics that are too math-adjacent. As a result, it seems to me that the niche status of quantitative psychology quantitative psychology tends to involve too much humanities for more math oriented individuals and too much math for humanities oriented individuals.
