Hey! Just wanted to know if anyone knew what exactly you do as a research psychologist or literally anything about the career cause I might be interested. Please do, thank you!
please omg theres almost no information online
@juillet any advice for the OP?
pleaseeee^
Hi, I’m a research psychologist! Thanks for the @, dorie13 
Research psychologists do pretty much exactly what it says in the name - they use psychological principles and research methods to conduct research on various topics.
There are lots of different settings in which you can be a research psychologist. I work at a technology company, but research psychologists work for universities, think tanks, nonprofits, social service organizations, government agencies, and other kinds of for-profit companies. Their job title isn’t always research psychologist (mine is actually “user experience researcher”).
The setting that you work in, plus your training, determines what questions you answer. For example, since I work for a technology company, my research is concerned with how people interact with the technology that we make and what makes it easier (or harder) to use. So I spend a lot of my time actually getting people to test in-development technology, collecting their feedback, and then analyzing that data. Then I meet with tech development teams to explain what I found and give them recommendations for how they can improve their products.
But that’s a really specific kind of psychologist; other research psychologists may conduct research on how to change people’s health behaviors and help design interventions for public health nonprofits and agencies; or they may do market research and help companies understand their consumers and the audiences for their products; or they may do really basic research on brain function or social relationships; or they may work for the military trying to understand how soldiers react to extreme situations and circumstances; or for NASA understanding how astronauts’ brains change when they go into space; or for human resources at a big company helping them figure out how to hire people…there are lots of different kinds of jobs.
Generally speaking, research psychologists need at least a master’s and more commonly a PhD in some field of psychology. Mine is in social psychology (and public health; I made a career change coming into technology). There are lots of different subfields - clinical, counseling, school, educational developmental, experimental, cognitive, community, health, quantitative, industrial/organizational, biological, social, and neuroscience/neuropsychology. You can read more about the individual subfields here: http://colfa.utsa.edu/psychology/subfields_of_psychology. Each subfield has its own body of research and methods/approaches; however, the lines between them are extremely porous, and PhD programs are pretty customizable. For instance, although technically I studied social psychology, my focus in graduate school was a blend of social, health, community, and quantitative psychology.
If you are in college and you are interested in a career in research psychology, here’s what you can do:
-Major in psychology! (really, you should. A minor is okay, but a major makes you most competitive.)
-Get some research experience. You can do this by assisting a professor in your department with their research and by participating in research programs over the summer. You can ask the professors in your department about this.
That’s at least a start, and then if you are interested in a PhD, you can talk to your professors and/or come back here for more guidance.
@juillet thank you so much for this! i really wanted to figure out if its a good or enjoyable career and it seems so! Thanks again!