Welcome to my blog! I hope in this post, I can accurately lay out what specifically I want to use this blog for, and what sort of content can be expected on a regular basis. I'll try to be as concise as possible, but bear with me, as this is also serving as a pseudo-design document for me.
About Me:
I do not want to spend too much time on this blog writing about myself, but it is worth giving some personal context for the rest of this blog. I am a senior psychology major at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast and I will be applying this winter to pursue a Ph.D in clinical psychology. My interests are naturally strongly influenced by the classes I've taken, so I'm most interested in attachment theory, narrative identity, and their application to evidence-based treatments. Outside of strict academic topics, I am also often interested by ways to integrate technology into research and methods to increase the visibility and accessibility of academic psychology research. These interests will form the core of the focus of this blog.
What and Why?:
With that out of the way, we draw towards the core question: What content will this blog cover?
The simple answer:
Anything interesting in psychology
However, that answer is unsatisfying to probably both you, the reader, and me, the writer, so I will try to provide a more comprehensive explanation.
At the center of the rationale for this blog is the idea of
accessibility. I personally think that a lot of the interesting research in psychology doesn't quite get through to the common populace because of the inherent inaccessibility of it. Journals play an important role in the field, as it is through them that researchers update each other on what is going on in their fields and put forth the results of their research to be looked at by others who are qualified to critically analyze the results and the methodology. However, journals are flawed when it comes to communicating findings to the public. This is partly because the common person does not have access to journals, as that is mostly restricted (by cost and by interest) to researchers in the fields. Also, when a layperson reads the journals, they often appear dense and opaque to the untrained eye. There are numerous tables, statistics, and field-specific jargon that is very useful to other researchers, but difficult for a layperson to assess. Therefore, the main way for the public to gain access to the latest research is through the media, often from science reporters on websites like the New York Times, CNN, and others. The science sections of the news are much more accessible compared to journals, but they pose problems to researchers instead of the public. The reporters are often looking to fill specific stories (
example given by an academic) and sometimes have headlines that don't accurately portray the research, but serve as attention-grabbers. Overall, this takes some agency away from the researchers, as their research may not come through to the public as clearly as possible.
However, there are researchers engaging in what I like to call "sub-journal" writing: writing that is below the formal level of an academic journal, but is still written by trained researchers in the field. One of my favorite websites to do this is the
Science of Relationships site, maintained by a group of relationship scientists who ground their opinions and advice of relationships in empirical studies pertaining to whatever topic they are covering. The language used on the website is mostly jargon-free and key terms and concepts are explained when they come up. In my opinion, it is an excellent model on which researchers in other fields of psychology should build on to raise visibility and counter "pop-psychology" theories that often are lacking in empirical basis.
So what's the point of talking at length on accessibility? Two paragraphs up, I said that the idea of accessibility was central to this blog. This is because I aim to make interesting findings in research more accessible to you, the reader. This brings us to the goals of this blog:
Goals:
1.
Breakdown interesting studies:
I intend to take interesting studies I come across through searches of literature, or from classes I am taking where I feel I have more to say about a study I have read, or even on suggestions from others, and both make them accessible to a casual reader of science and offer some sort of critical analysis when applicable. Naturally, these studies will probably play towards my own research interests, as I am most intrigued by those studies, and also I'm probably not skilled enough to breakdown the studies outside of the fields I am familiar with.
2.
Address other topics of interests:
It's not going to be all studies though, as there are other things pertaining to psychology that I want to explore. For example, a topic may be how to best integrate new technology, both hardware and software, into psychology research, or it may be exploring new methodologies or stronger ways to analyze data. This will be both things I think of and topics I come across while being on the Internet or in conversation with other people.
3.
Application of studies:
The translation of research from the academic field to the "real world" is another idea that deserves much thought, so I will try to explore how research could possibly translate, or even how it has already translated to the non-academia world.
Wrap-Up
I think that's a pretty good start on explaining what I want to accomplish, so I think it's time to wrap-up this post and actually get to writing the content of this blog. A quick logistical aside: I'm probably going to aim to update once or twice a week, depending on how busy I am with other things.
Thanks for reading!
