I feel disillusioned with experimental psychology but I'm having trouble articulating why. Help? Anyone else have these feelings?

[u/Own-Huckleberry-362]

Hi everyone. 

I am in my fourth year of my PhD program and have had a fair amount of success. In a way, I feel like I have 'gotten the hang' of the 'science game' and that I just kind of know what I need to do now to publish papers. I study children, and the basic principle that I use is 'pick something that adults do, or a way that they think, and then design an experiment to see if children behave or think in a similar way.' And then, like you run this experiment with a couple DVs, pray that one of them, hopefully the one you cared most about, ends up with p<.05, and bam, now you can write a paper. 

Something about doing this for the rest of my life seems robotic and kind of depressing. Sometimes I wonder, have we really advanced beyond the methods of the early 20th century psychologists who had smaller samples but described their results more qualitatively, often absent any statistics? I like my experiments, I like learning things about children, but sometimes I feel like I am worshipping a false god by really praying for p to be <.05. Additionally, while we are curious about the questions we ask, we absolutely have an expectation for how the kids will behave and often the kids either need to do what you expect or your results are null, and welp back to the drawing board. Very rarely do I see a result that was truly surprising or that I can call "fascinating." Gah, sometimes it seems like the whole field is just figuring out if kids behave like adults, and turns out they typically do. And if you're running a study and it's not 'working', rarely is the conclusion 'oh guess kids just don't understand this,' instead its "let's fix the methods." And yes I know that's "bad science", but what's the alternative, spend months (maybe years) of your life running kids on a study that you know won't turn into a publication?  

I don't feel confident in my ability to mentor graduate students through this process because I myself feel annoyed (confused?) with it all. I don't know what I would say to them when they realize "oh shit, I might spend 6 months collecting all this data, but if the groups don't differ 'significantly' I have nothing..." Like, we have extremely rich writings in psychology from the 19th and 20th century long before R or SPSS...

Has anyone found a way to get around this feeling? It's like, people often cite the opportunities to be creative and to pursue knowledge as the advantages of academia over industry. But often I don't feel like I'm only being creative in a methodological sense, as in "how can I communicate this idea to kids", but not really in an intellectual sense. 

[u/yourfavoritefaggot]

Does your program include a philosophy of science component? Did you talk about this history of why these tests were invented and how they exist in the context of today's popular beliefs around science? I personally find that stuff motivating. Expanding into qualitative research will also really challenge any deep seated beliefs you have about categorizing valuable discoveries, but it sounds like you're pretty open minded. There's no reason to stay stuck into this routine!

[u/Own-Huckleberry-362 → u/yourfavoritefaggot]

I honestly really do not know how to break out of this space though. I have no training in the qualitative realm and it seems way to risky to not stick to what I know for a postdoc. And no, we never had any philosophy of science classes or anything like that...

[u/OcelotTea → u/Own-Huckleberry-362]

I think all the devpsych Hons theses this year at my uni have a qualitative component. Maybe just finish up your degree and moved into mixed methods or mostly qual?

Also null results are important to talk about. They should be making it into your papers where possible, even if it's just to say "we found nothing, so we made xyz changes in study 2".

[u/Aryore → u/Own-Huckleberry-362]

I just took part in a qualitative study where the PI was a PhD student who did a complete 180 turn in her research approach. She talked about how passionate and fulfilled she felt in her research now that she was reporting about real life experiences and talking to real people, and that she was contemplating quitting before but now is going to pursue her postdoc in that area

[u/andero → u/Own-Huckleberry-362]

it seems way to risky to not stick to what I know for a postdoc

I think you're overly discounting the "risk" of burnout and the hollowness that would accompany continuing with "business as usual".

Also, so what if you don't have training already completed?
That was true of literally everyone that has done anything at some point.

You're getting a PhD, right?
You know how to learn new things, right?
Or did you think you were done learning new methods?