<p>I have a research position in a psych department (human development labs), im a nutrition major and havent taken a class in psychology because it wont fit in my sche (pre-med)… so my question is to seasoned researchers is if you really need to know a subject well when youre doing research in it if you maybe want to publish something by the time you graduate. </p>
<p>-thanks</p>
<p>I think if you were going to go to the level of publishing something it would really help to have at least an introductory course.
if you want to be a lead author (or at least a reasonably involved author) you will need to know the literature for your field and subfield, which means reading a lot of previously published papers. taking an intro course would help you with the vocab and also the research methods used in those papers, and give you the basic foundation you need to learn from other media (books, talks, etc.)
however, you can still benefit if you take those courses in the coming years. I don’t know what year you are, but I can tell you that the courses that proved to be most applicable to my independent research were generally ones from junior and senior year.
if you get started on research before you have taken a course in the field, presumably you’ll be working on a project that belongs to a grad student or a post doc, and in that case you will also learn a lot on the job. it will give you a better idea of what you like, and what psych classes might be most interesting to you. my class choices while at Cornell were heavily influenced by the research experiences I had, and I think that was definitely a good thing!</p>
<p>one caveat: it is possible that your nutrition background will help you with psych more than you expected. if you learn some basic important things like experimental design, data interpretation (including stats) and basically how science happens, that will help you anywhere. the research questions will be different, but the process is the same. in cases where the process is different (for example, I imagine survey methods are used less compared to psych) you can think more critically about their utility as an outsider. that’s kinda cool. </p>
<p>let me know if you have any other questions. I don’t have research experience in either psych or nutrition but I did a lot of research during my undergrad at Cornell.</p>