Psychology and Maths
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Is it true that you need to have good maths in order to study Psychology?
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Do you absolutely need it? Nope. Would it be really, REALLY handy? Yup.
Statistics is going to be a part of the course, and you're going to have to pass it. Basically, you don't need to know precisely how you got the numbers (you've got plenty of stats programs that will do the work for you), but you will need to know what the numbers tell you, and if thiose figures can be trusted.
You can get by learning everything by heart, but it's handy to have a background in mathematics because you'll understand what you're doing better. I hated calculus in secondary school and JC, but it came in handy when I did my thesis - instead of having to read a number of chapters about the implications of the statistical method I was using, all I had to do was read the formula to understand the implications. -
Oh nuts. I got D for my maths module last term. And I'm probably going to fare like shit for my statistics module now. I got 0/20 for the last test. Damn.
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Haha I hate statistics and my math sucks as well.
Anyway I think that for psychology it helps if you can think in a logical and organized manner.
My uncle always tells me that my math does not suck but it's just that I'm too lazy and disorganized in my thoughts and try to think too far ahead and mess up along the way.
You could be guilty of that as well
Anyway for someone who suck at math I'm great at algebra for some reason. -
What statistical methods are you studying at the moment?Originally posted by SingaporeMacross:Oh nuts. I got D for my maths module last term. And I'm probably going to fare like shit for my statistics module now. I got 0/20 for the last test. Damn.
Statistics isn't exactly like mathematics. Like I said, in stats you need to focus on what the numbers tell you in order to make sense of the subject.
As an example of "what the numbers tell you", if you have a difference in means of 1 (out of 10) and a p-value of .001, you have a very significant difference and therefore a solid result, but at the end of the day, that difference is still very small. Of course, in interpreting the result, you also need to make sure that other factors like sample size and distributions of scores are all OK.
The mathematics comes in to help you better understand what you're doing. If you can understand how the equations work, you will pretty much automatically know why some statistical methods are more robust than others to sampling conditions that are not ideal. However, if you know that one method is more robust than the other, nobody's going to penalise you if you can't explain the nuts and bolts of why this is so. It's only once you get to the thesis-writing levels that you would be better off knowing the fine details (so if you do intend to get to Homours or postgrad, it's an area that you will need to work on). -
Now I'm doing normal distribution. I have an SPSS project coming up soon.