The Tragedy of Research and Psychology in India
Why Good Psychologists Need To Be Good Researchers
A few years ago I was at a Paper Presentation Competition organised by the Department of Psychology of a reputed college in University of Delhi. Among the participants in the competition, I came across a group of researchers who had done a great research in gender differences.
They had a decent sample size. The tools they used were reliable and valid. They had solid theory behind the reasoning for doing this study.
There was one problem. They hadn't analysed their data at all. They had simply presented the data as they recorded it - in pie charts and bar graphs.
Ideally, when you are doing a study on gender differences, you are expected to use some form of inferential statistics. These researchers had not. Why?
In their own words, “They were scared of the statistics part.”
The students in the last semester of the undergrad degree were so unsure about their statistical and research skills that they didn’t use even the simplest of tools for data analysis.
All the data used by them lay raw and unused. It was honestly a travesty. I brushed it off as an exceptional case. There are some students who struggle a lot with statistics.
I didn't realise how many of them were there.
Today, I am going to share how the psychology curriculum and teaching style is creating generations upon generations of low-quality researchers who also end up becoming psychologists — and why that is bad news for the future of Psychology.
My experiences are limited to what I have observed in India. I am aware this will be read by people in 40 countries. I would love to hear different experiences of research education in different countries. Is this a global phenomenon or localised to India?
Education in Psychological Research
At an undergraduate level, Psychology students are expected to know the very basics of research methodology.
What is a research?
Why do we do it?
What does it do?
How to conduct a good research?
How to collect and analyse data?
How to formulate hypotheses?
How to use statistics to create knowledge and insights?
and so on. We rarely dive deep into the philosophy behind conducting research or when and why we should choose one method over the other.
Even at this basic level, there is quite a lot of struggle that teachers experience.
I remember when we were being taught the t-test, our professor himself was so confused that he ended up confusing us as well.
At one point previously in the semester, our professor had asked me ( a 2nd semester student) to take the class because she thought I could explain it better than her.
This points towards a larger cultural problem. There have been so many generations of teachers who have winged research method and stats that even teachers are now often clueless about the subject they are teaching.
The belief that you only need to “clear” the exam to leave the subject behind has made people put as little effort as possible.
If you look at the questions that are asked in exams on the subject of research methods, you would be surprised at how basic the questions are.
The standards of “acceptable” level of knowledge have dropped so low that they are now lower than my self-esteem!
Why Does Research Matter?
I see this point being raised by students who are purely interested in clinical/counselling/ I/O psychology.
“If we are only going to practice with people, why do we need to be good at research?”
Well that is because before being psychologists, we are supposed to be scientists.
If you truly believe that psychology is a “science of human behaviour thoughts and cognition” then you cannot skip over the science part.
Research allows us to understand how the knowledge we read in our textbooks was created, how it can be improved upon and how we can create knowledge of our own.
We are scientists before all — and we cannot be good scientists if we don’t know how science works.
Being good at research also allows you to separate the effective treatment from the “treatments” that have good marketing.
If we had better research students, we might not have so many psychology students also calling themselves “reiki healers”/ “graphologists”/ “face readers”.
Suggesting that we can skip over or do as little as possible for the subject of research and become a good psychologist is hilariously myopic for me.
It would be like a doctor saying that they skipped the subject of human anatomy because it got too complex for them.
My article today comes from a place of frustration as well as disappointment. The problem with research education in India is that it is very easy to be a bad researcher. It can even be rewarding.
You can get your papers published no matter how shoddy your methods are.
How do I go up against that and try to change it?
When the whole system is okay with substandard education and practice, how do I encourage people to hold themselves up to a higher standard?
The best I can do is write. I am also trying to explain complex topics in easy ways so that more and more people understand these things.
It is always going to be easy to be mediocre. It is not easy to hold yourself up to a higher standard and expect better from yourself.
If you are a psychology student reading this, don’t forget that you are a scientist as well.
Act like one.
Until next time,
Arjun
Thank you very much for talking about this. I thought i was the only one feeling this. I think in most cases, it's teachers who confuse us with stats and its frustrating. I experience that in every semester and they do not tell us where and why we use it. My teacher told that the stats that they teach, most of them aren't used anywhere and it's there in our curriculum for the sake of being there. I do not know how much of it true but it's disheartening to see how research isn't given any value.
Beautifully constructed, Arjun. I recently came across an incident where a quantitative researcher and professor of a reputed university failed to describe the concept of p-value, when asked at a national conference. Very upsetting indeed.