what kind of maths are involved in psychology?

j2u

hi i interested in doing psychology,i have applied fr the evening diploma in psychology in dublin business school,i have always been inerested in people and how we think.anyway i was wonering how the hell math equations can help people with psychological problems.exactly how would you ude statistics for each individual?but aany ath equations would they be similar to algebra equations??

Budo.Judo.Kev

stats.

John

Yeah, statistics are hugely important to any science. You won't need to know trigonometry or whatever but being able to understand and perform statistics is vital. It's not a question of an equation helping someone, psychology involves looking at hundreds of people and comparing the data collected from them and running stats on the data. If you look at any psychology paper there will be tons of stats in them as data is only worthy of mention if it is statistically significant (which means that the data is not due to chance).

snorlax

in the tcd course they do stats/ research methodologies in first, second and third year, they they apply what they learned and make use of it their final project. areas covered under this include scientific methodology, statistics and psychological methods of investigation, it can also include using these stats in methods of psychological assessment, psychometrics, and using them in IT (eg in stats programs like SPSS).

Myksyk

j2u wrote:

i was wonering how the hell math equations can help people with psychological problems.

You're confusing psychology (an academic/scientific pursuit) with clinical psychology (one of the professions which has derived from psychology).

Psychology is the scientific study of human behaviour, cognition, emotion etc etc. It is essentially an inferential science that depends on statistically analysing research data to infer general conclusions about group and individual behaviour, cognition etc. Clinical psychology is an applied derivative of psychology which aims (in theory anyway) to apply findings from scientific psychology to intervene with various human problems.

j2u

so does clinical psychology not involve stats then??

John

It does, you need to be able to understand all the literature in order to treat your patients. However you wouldn't use stats on a patient to patient basis (you don't diagnose someone by running an ANOVA on them ). Plus to do clinical psychology you'll have to have done a general psychology degree (clinical is only taught as a postgraduate course) so you'll already have learned stats before starting.

hotspur

While statistics is a very important subject when doing a degree in psychology (in TCD we did stats to the level of their masters in statistics course by the end of 1st year), it is not important for the course you would be doing in DBS. It is a diploma in popular psychology and as it is not intended to train you as a researcher so I'm pretty sure there are no statistics or maths involved at all.

krankykitty

OP, are you doing the 10 week Popular Psychology diploma, or the year long diploma in Psychology?
AFAIK the 1 year course involves taking 4 modules at degree level so this may or may not include statistics..

j2u

yeah im taking the year long diploma looking forward to it .it starts in october.