This past week it has occurred to me how little I actually know. Not just in a philosophical vastness of knowledge kind of way, but with regard to the very basics of psychology. This may well be career suicide to admit this, but over the past few weeks, it has become increasingly apparent how much I have forgotten from my undergraduate degree. I have found myself having a quick google on more than one occasion to refresh my memory on what things actually are (the most embarrassing of which has to be that of what actually constitutes a DV, aka dependent variable). I seem to have forgotten a lot, and this kind of worries me, which got me thinking, how much does anyone actually remember from their undergrad and is it okay to have to go back and relearn this stuff? We better hope that it is, or I need to find myself another career, because right now I appear to be distinctly lacking in a depth of knowledge when it comes to Quantitative methods and data analysis.
It seems to me that Psychology is all about such depth of knowledge, but what really is it? I imagine it can mean different things to different people, but I feel that the quote in the above image from McCarron et al. (2022) made me think about what is required when conducting research. As a researcher, it is less about what you know and more about what you want to know. Well, okay, so maybe that's not entirely true; in order to justify why we want to find something out, we must first find out what is already known about a thing, which is how I stumbled upon the little gem of a paragraph introduction by McCarron et al. Just because we don't know everything about a thing, doesn't mean that it is not known......at least somewhere. If it is already known somewhere, then we have lost our argument to conduct research to find it out, as that's been done already; what we need then to do is read the academic articles and papers that have done the research to find out what we want to know, and that is a lot quicker and easier (okay so I'm simplifying here, but I hope you follow my point). So, once we have found out what is already known and what is not known, we can then justify looking for what is not yet known. Bare with me; I do have a point to this.
Now, this is where my apparent now lack of knowledge comes in. During R (or "Arrrgh", as it was referred to in my maiden post), I have encountered coding designed to compute a whole host of data analysis outputs that I recognise but cannot for the life of me recall the purpose of, let alone the what the values of the results refer to or even mean - except the mean, I mean, I remember the mean but what the values of the other outputs mean...well on that I am lost! So, I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm thinking I'm doomed, but then I remember that we had a module in which we learned a whole host of different quantitative (numbers) data analysis techniques during my under-grad and I suspect it was back in Level 5. So I get myself on my laptop and go back through my files, looking at the Level 5 course content I have saved, which I kept under course codes instead of course title - perhaps I have something to learn from that, as a whole lot of numbers all strung together with a "PY05" at the front isn't meaning a lot to me right now - but anyway I digress, I eventually find a file which contains a lot of lectures that look like they might be about "Quant" and from that it occurs to me that we probably had "essential" reading assigned to this module, and whilst I like a good text book as much as the next girl (probably more in all honesty) I can't recall ever buying a one for the module, we'll blame my mathematical arrogance for that (which is a whole other story). So deeper down the rabbit hole I go to find some essential reading; maybe it's still on the Blackboard site I use for university somewhere...… Bingo, it is! Never mind checking if it's available in the library, I'm ordering that textbook straight off Amazon; I'm not going through this whole debacle again because, let's be honest, I will encounter many more methods of quantitative analysis that I have entirely forgotten existed before my time on this MRes is done!
It is then it occurs to me that whilst depth of knowledge is important for all kinds of reasons, especially when it comes to creating a rationale for your reasons behind wanting to conduct some specific research, perhaps what is equally important is knowing where to look for that knowledge that you know it likely exist, but that you haven't encountered yet or that you misplaced it somewhere along the way. Because, whilst depth of knowledge is a truly great thing, is it not the quest for knowledge that did indeed lead us into research in the first place.
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