consumer of research definition psychology

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Consumer Psychology and Behavior

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

What Is Consumer Psychology?

• Science of Consumer Behavior
• Role of Consumer Psychologist
• Education and Training

Career Options

Are you interested in why and how people buy some products and not others? Have you ever wondered how media messages influence a shopper's buying choices? If so, then you might be interested in the growing field known as consumer psychology.

Consumer psychology is a specialty area that studies how our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and perceptions influence how we buy and relate to goods and services. In the United States, widely considered a highly consumerist society, this area of study is particularly relevant.

One formal definition of the field describes it as "the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use, and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society."

Consumer psychologists investigate how the decision-making process, social persuasion , and motivation influence why shoppers buy some things but not others.

In this overview of the profession, learn more about what consumer psychologists do and where they work.

The Science of Consumer Behavior

According to the Society for Consumer Psychology, Division 23 of the American Psychological Association , consumer psychology "employs theoretical psychological approaches to understanding consumers."  

This field is often considered a subspecialty of industrial-organizational psychology and is also known as the psychology of consumer behavior or the psychology of marketing. Consumer psychologists study a variety of topics including:

• How consumers choose businesses, products, and services
• The thought processes and emotions behind consumer decisions
• How environmental variables such as friends, family, media, and culture influence buying decisions
• What motivates people to choose one product over another
• How personal factors and individual differences affect people's buying choices
• What marketers can do to effectively reach out to their target customers

What Consumer Psychologists Do

So what exactly does a typical consumer psychologist do? These professionals play a critical role not only in helping businesses understand what their customers want and need but also in helping sellers promote and market their products and services to buyers.

Conduct Market Research

Because businesses need to understand their consumers in order to develop products and marketing campaigns that appeal to their target audience, consumer psychologists often spend a great deal of time learning more about what makes shoppers tick. This often involves first figuring out the target audience for a particular product, including the gender, age, and socioeconomic status of the typical shopper.

Next, the consumer psychologist might begin researching the types of products and marketing messages that appeal to these types of buyers.

Develop Marketing Messages

Other consumer psychologists might focus on social marketing, or how ideas and messages spread among groups. Researchers might be interested in getting out information about a product or an important public health message.

Learning how beliefs and attitudes spread among groups can help organizations learn how to better get their message out and encourage word-of-mouth marketing.

Research Consumer Attitudes and Behaviors

Consumer psychologists often conduct research to learn more about buyer behavior. Common research methods used by these professionals include experiments, phone surveys, focus groups, direct observations, and questionnaires.

Chances are good that you have participated in at least one market research survey in your life. These are often conducted by phone, but they may also be done online or through direct mail. In a survey , consumers are often asked to describe their past shopping behavior, factors that influenced their decision-making , and their future buying plans.

Researchers also typically gather details about each respondent's sex, age, race, educational history, and current financial situation. This type of information can be very useful since it allows researchers to look for patterns and learn more about who buys certain products.  

For example, using a survey might allow researchers to discover that women between the ages of 30 and 45 who have a household income between $50,000 to $100,000 are most likely to buy a particular product or service. By knowing this, they can then begin designing marketing campaigns aimed at this target audience.

Education and Training Requirements

So what kind of training do you need if you want to be a consumer psychologist? Most entry-level jobs in consumer psychology require at least a bachelor's degree in psychology .

Entry-level jobs with a bachelor's degree typically involve planning, conducting, and interpreting the results of market research campaigns.

Those interested in more advanced positions or in teaching at the university level will need a master's or doctorate degree in an area related to consumer psychology. Such degree options include general psychology, industrial-organizational psychology , marketing, and consumer studies.  

If you are interested in becoming a consumer psychologist:

• Focus on taking courses that will build your understanding of human behavior, marketing, social psychology , personality, and culture
• Take courses in advertising and marketing
• Take courses in experimental methods , particularly experimental design and statistics

The career path you ultimately choose will depend a great deal upon your interests and educational background. For example, if you have an interest in conducting theoretical research and teaching, consider earning a doctorate degree so that you can teach courses and perform original research at a university. If you prefer to work in an area like market research, advertising, or sales, a bachelor's degree might be sufficient.

Other job options include acting as a consultant for private businesses or working for government agencies.

In such jobs, consumer psychologists might be asked to perform a wide range of duties, including development marketing campaigns, researching buyer trends, designing social media advertising, or analyzing statistics.

Understanding what makes people buy the things they do is much more than a guessing game. Businesses now employ consumer psychologists to scientifically evaluate their customer's decisions and choices. The next time you look at an advertisement or take a consumer survey, consider the role that consumer psychologists may have played in developing those messages and questionnaires.

Solomon M. Consumer Psychology .  Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology . 2004:483-492. doi:10.1016/b0-12-657410-3/00219-1

Society for Consumer Psychology. SCP's culture and values .

Ali AM, Said AM, Salleh MZM. Demographic profile and purchasing pattern of organic cosmetic products . In: Abdullah M, Yahya W, Ramli N, Mohamed S, Ahmad B, eds. Regional Conference on Science, Technology and Social Sciences. Singapore: Springer; 2016. doi:10.1007/978-981-10-1458-1_81

American Psychological Association. Careers in psychology .

Haugtvedt CP, Herr PM, Kardes FR, eds. Handbook of Consumer Psychology. New York: Taylor & Francis Group; 2018.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Freudian Psychology

The psychology of consumer behavior, research into consumers’ minds is rooted in psychoanalysis..

Posted June 10, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• What Is Freudian Psychology?
• Find counselling near me
• Psychoanalytic theory served as the basis for research into consumer behavior.
• American society in the post-World War II years was an ideal climate for psychoanalytic theory to thrive.
• Psychoanalytic techniques were widely applied in consumer research in the 1950s.

While the psychology of consumer behavior would veer off into a number of different directions in the 1950s, its core remained psychoanalytic theory brought over from Europe in the 1930s. Nothing happened by chance in the human mind, the founding father of psychoanalysis , Sigmund Freud, had put forth. It was this idea that explained why marketers believed they had to probe consumers’ minds for the less-than-obvious.

Value of Unconscious Thoughts

Not only was each “psychic event” meaningful in some way, according to Freud, but each one was also determined by those preceding it, suggesting there was a certain logic even to the irrational. Unconscious thoughts were as significant, frequent, and normal as conscious ones in the universe of psychoanalysis, making them just as valuable to marketers as to therapists in terms of understanding people’s behavior.

It was ironic that psychologists of Freud’s own time considered his theories so strange when they became so popular with experts and laypeople alike in postwar America. “Thought” was strictly a conscious concept to psychologists a century ago when for Freud much of the activity of the human mind was unconscious.

Such unorthodox views made Freud persona non grata at universities until the 1930s when psychoanalysis finally began to be taken seriously. Academics in other social sciences—cultural anthropology, sociology, and even social psychology—were particularly hostile to psychoanalysis; their scorn receded only when they were thrown together in interdisciplinary military departments during World War II.

Immediately after that war, clinical psychology began to be taught en masse at universities, with hundreds of psychoanalysts soon hanging out their shingles to tackle Americans’ many emotional problems. The business community, which had viewed Freud, with his preoccupation with sex , as irrelevant at best, too started warming up to psychoanalysis at mid-century. “As more and more psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, and anthropologists plunged into the hurly-burly of the advertising offices,” noted Edith Witt in 1959, “the difference between an adman and a behavioral scientist became only a matter of degree.”

Although such a thing had of course not at all been on Freud’s own mind, the revolutionary form of psychology that had developed in Austria in the late 19th century fit like a glove with American-style marketing some 50 years later. Freud had focused on the self, after all, and what better resource than consumer culture to create a unique personality and stand out from the crowd?

Theory of Need Gratification

Freud’s theory of need gratification, whereby the relative satisfaction of one’s needs as a child shaped one’s adult personality, too was something marketers were very happy to learn about, knowing their ad agencies could figure out ways to complete (or compensate for) what was missing from consumers’ lives. Maslow’s theory of needs, first published in 1954—when excitement around consumer research was beginning to peak—also came in handy, offering marketers another model by which to better understand and more effectively sell products to consumers.

It was Freud, however, who researchers looked to first to get deep into consumers’ minds, where the reasons for their frequently inexplicable behavior resided. His concept of the unconscious, with its hidden desires that shaped people’s behavior, was a particularly powerful idea for marketers to embrace and exploit. Rationalization , the process by which conscious or unconscious acts were made to appear rational, was another psychiatric concept marketers could easily relate to.

Projection , an unconscious mechanism people used to cast off their weaknesses onto others, would turn out to be an ideal consumer research technique, as would free association, which Freud used to extract unconscious feelings and thoughts. Freud was, in short, a godsend to Madison Avenue; his radical views were ideal to advance consumer culture by allowing postwar Americans’ ids to run free.

With peer pressure , conformity, and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses defining themes in American society in the 1950s, psychoanalysis was not surprisingly having a field day; the fear of being somehow “abnormal” was perhaps at an all-time high. It was specifically the profound anxiety of not being in control, of losing one’s mind, that provided a perfect breeding ground for Freudian thought to resonate so strongly.

Other cultural factors—the triumph of a new medium specifically designed to promote consumerism (television), the trust in “experts” and “research” of all stripes, the realization that politicians could and should be marketed as brands, and, of course, the baby boom—too helped pave the way for various forms of research into consumers’ minds to flourish.

Samuel, Lawrence R. (2010). Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lawrence R. Samuel, Ph.D. , is an American cultural historian who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and was a Smithsonian Institution Fellow.

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Chapter 3. Psychological Science

3.3 You Can Be an Informed Consumer of Psychological Research

Learning objectives.

• Outline the four potential threats to the validity of research and discuss how they may make it difficult to accurately interpret research findings.
• Describe how confounding may reduce the internal validity of an experiment.
• Explain how generalization, replication, and meta-analyses are used to assess the external validity of research findings.

Good research is valid research. When research is valid , the conclusions drawn by the researcher are legitimate . For instance, if a researcher concludes that participating in psychotherapy reduces anxiety, or that taller people are smarter than shorter people, the research is valid only if the therapy really works or if taller people really are smarter. Unfortunately, there are many threats to the validity of research, and these threats may sometimes lead to unwarranted conclusions. Often, and despite researchers’ best intentions, some of the research reported on websites as well as in newspapers, magazines, and even scientific journals is invalid. Validity is not an all-or-nothing proposition, which means that some research is more valid than other research. Only by understanding the potential threats to validity will you be able to make knowledgeable decisions about the conclusions that can or cannot be drawn from a research project. There are four major types of threats to the validity of research, and informed consumers of research are aware of each type.

Threats to the Validity of Research

• Threats to construct validity. Although it is claimed that the measured variables measure the conceptual variables of interest, they actually may not.
• Threats to statistical conclusion validity. Conclusions regarding the research may be incorrect because no statistical tests were made or because the statistical tests were incorrectly interpreted.
• Threats to internal validity. Although it is claimed that the independent variable caused the dependent variable, the dependent variable actually may have been caused by a confounding variable.
• Threats to external validity. Although it is claimed that the results are more general, the observed effects may actually only be found under limited conditions or for specific groups of people. (Stangor, 2011)

One threat to valid research occurs when there is a threat to construct validity . Construct validity  refers to the extent to which the variables used in the research adequately assess the conceptual variables they were designed to measure . One requirement for construct validity is that the measure be reliable , where reliability  refers to the consistency of a measured variable . A bathroom scale is usually reliable, because if we step on and off it a couple of times, the scale will consistently measure the same weight every time. Other measures, including some psychological tests, may be less reliable, and thus less useful.

Normally, we can assume that the researchers have done their best to assure the construct validity of their measures, but it is not inappropriate for you, as an informed consumer of research, to question this. It is always important to remember that the ability to learn about the relationship between the conceptual variables in a research hypothesis is dependent on the operational definitions of the measured variables. If the measures do not really measure the conceptual variables that they are designed to assess (e.g., if a supposed IQ test does not really measure intelligence), then they cannot be used to draw inferences about the relationship between the conceptual variables (Nunnally, 1978).

The statistical methods that scientists use to test their research hypotheses are based on probability estimates. You will see statements in research reports indicating that the results were statistically significant or not statistically significant . These statements will be accompanied by statistical tests, often including statements such as p < 0.05 or about confidence intervals. These statements describe the statistical significance of the data that have been collected. Statistical significance  refers to the confidence with which a scientist can conclude that data are not due to chance or random error . When a researcher concludes that a result is statistically significant, he or she has determined that the observed data was very unlikely to have been caused by chance factors alone. Hence, there is likely a real relationship between or among the variables in the research design. Otherwise, the researcher concludes that the results were not statistically significant.

Statistical conclusion validity  refers to the extent to which we can be certain that the researcher has drawn accurate conclusions about the statistical significance of the research . Research will be invalid if the conclusions made about the research hypothesis are incorrect because statistical inferences about the collected data are in error. These errors can occur either because the scientist inappropriately infers that the data do support the research hypothesis when in fact they are due to chance, or when the researcher mistakenly fails to find support for the research hypothesis. Normally, we can assume that the researchers have done their best to ensure the statistical conclusion validity of a research design, but we must always keep in mind that inferences about data are probabilistic and never certain — this is why research never proves a theory.

Internal validity  refers to the extent to which we can trust the conclusions that have been drawn about the causal relationship between the independent and dependent variables (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). Internal validity applies primarily to experimental research designs, in which the researcher hopes to conclude that the independent variable has caused the dependent variable. Internal validity is maximized when the research is free from the presence of confounding variables — variables other than the independent variable on which the participants in one experimental condition differ systematically from those in other conditions .

Consider an experiment in which a researcher tested the hypothesis that drinking alcohol makes members of the opposite sex look more attractive. Participants older than 21 years of age were randomly assigned to drink either orange juice mixed with vodka or orange juice alone. To eliminate the need for deception, the participants were told whether or not their drinks contained vodka. After enough time had passed for the alcohol to take effect, the participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of pictures of members of the opposite sex. The results of the experiment showed that, as predicted, the participants who drank the vodka rated the photos as significantly more attractive.

If you think about this experiment for a minute, it may occur to you that although the researcher wanted to draw the conclusion that the alcohol caused the differences in perceived attractiveness, the expectation of having consumed alcohol is confounded with the presence of alcohol. That is, the people who drank alcohol also knew they drank alcohol, and those who did not drink alcohol knew they did not. It is possible that simply knowing that they were drinking alcohol, rather than the effect of the alcohol itself, may have caused the differences (see Figure 3.18, “An Example of Confounding”). One solution to the problem of potential expectancy effects is to tell both groups that they are drinking orange juice and vodka but really give alcohol to only half of the participants (it is possible to do this because vodka has very little smell or taste). If differences in perceived attractiveness are found, the experimenter could then confidently attribute them to the alcohol rather than to the expectancy about having consumed alcohol.

Another threat to internal validity can occur when the experimenter knows the research hypothesis and also knows which experimental condition the participants are in. The outcome is the potential for experimenter bias , a situation in which the experimenter subtly treats the research participants in the various experimental conditions differently, resulting in an invalid confirmation of the research hypothesis . In one study demonstrating experimenter bias, Rosenthal and Fode (1963) sent 12 students to test a research hypothesis concerning maze learning in rats. Although it was not initially revealed to the students, they were actually the participants in an experiment. Six of the students were randomly told that the rats they would be testing had been bred to be highly intelligent, whereas the other six students were led to believe that the rats had been bred to be unintelligent. In reality there were no differences among the rats given to the two groups of students. When the students returned with their data, a startling result emerged. The rats run by students who expected them to be intelligent showed significantly better maze learning than the rats run by students who expected them to be unintelligent. Somehow the students’ expectations influenced their data. They evidently did something different when they tested the rats, perhaps subtly changing how they timed the maze running or how they treated the rats. And this experimenter bias probably occurred entirely out of their awareness.

To avoid experimenter bias, researchers frequently run experiments in which the researchers are blind to condition . This means that although the experimenters know the research hypotheses, they do not know which conditions the participants are assigned to . Experimenter bias cannot occur if the researcher is blind to condition. In a double-blind experiment , both the researcher and the research participants are blind to condition . For instance, in a double-blind trial of a drug, the researcher does not know whether the drug being given is the real drug or the ineffective placebo, and the patients also do not know which they are getting. Double-blind experiments eliminate the potential for experimenter effects and at the same time eliminate participant expectancy effects.

While internal validity refers to conclusions drawn about events that occurred within the experiment, external validity  refers to the extent to which the results of a research design can be generalized beyond the specific way the original experiment was conducted . Generalization refers to the extent to which relationships among conceptual variables can be demonstrated in a wide variety of people and a wide variety of manipulated or measured variables .

Psychologists who use university students as participants in their research may be concerned about generalization, wondering if their research will generalize to people who are not college students. And researchers who study the behaviours of employees in one company may wonder whether the same findings would translate to other companies. Whenever there is reason to suspect that a result found for one sample of participants would not hold up for another sample, then research may be conducted with these other populations to test for generalization.

Recently, many psychologists have been interested in testing hypotheses about the extent to which a result will replicate across people from different cultures (Heine, 2010). For instance, a researcher might test whether the effects on aggression of viewing violent video games are the same for Japanese children as they are for Canadian children by showing violent and nonviolent films to a sample of both Japanese and Canadian schoolchildren. If the results are the same in both cultures, then we say that the results have generalized, but if they are different , then we have learned a limiting condition of the effect (see Table 3.4, “A Cross-Cultural Replication”).

In a cross-cultural replication, external validity is observed if the same effects that have been found in one culture are replicated in another culture. If they are not replicated in the new culture, then a limiting condition of the original results is found.

Unless the researcher has a specific reason to believe that generalization will not hold, it is appropriate to assume that a result found in one population (even if that population is college or university students) will generalize to other populations. Because the investigator can never demonstrate that the research results generalize to all populations, it is not expected that the researcher will attempt to do so. Rather, the burden of proof rests on those who claim that a result will not generalize.

Because any single test of a research hypothesis will always be limited in terms of what it can show, important advances in science are never the result of a single research project. Advances occur through the accumulation of knowledge that comes from many different tests of the same theory or research hypothesis. These tests are conducted by different researchers using different research designs, participants, and operationalizations of the independent and dependent variables. The process of repeating previous research, which forms the basis of all scientific inquiry , is known as replication .

Scientists often use a procedure known as meta-analysis to summarize replications of research findings. A meta-analysis  is a statistical technique that uses the results of existing studies to integrate and draw conclusions about those studies . Because meta-analyses provide so much information, they are very popular and useful ways of summarizing research literature.

A meta-analysis provides a relatively objective method of reviewing research findings because it (a) specifies inclusion criteria that indicate exactly which studies will or will not be included in the analysis, (b) systematically searches for all studies that meet the inclusion criteria, and (c) provides an objective measure of the strength of observed relationships. Frequently, the researchers also include — if they can find them — studies that have not been published in journals.

Psychology in Everyday Life: Critically Evaluating the Validity of Websites

The validity of research reports published in scientific journals is likely to be high because the hypotheses, methods, results, and conclusions of the research have been rigorously evaluated by other scientists, through peer review, before the research was published. For this reason, you will want to use peer-reviewed journal articles as your major source of information about psychological research.

Although research articles are the gold standard for validity, you may also need and desire to get at least some information from other sources. The Internet is a vast source of information from which you can learn about almost anything, including psychology. Search engines — such as Google or Yahoo! — bring hundreds or thousands of hits on a topic, and online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, provide articles about relevant topics.

Although you will naturally use the web to help you find information about fields such as psychology, you must also realize that it is important to carefully evaluate the validity of the information you get from the web. You must try to distinguish information that is based on empirical research from information that is based on opinion, and between valid and invalid data. The following material may be helpful to you in learning to make these distinctions.

The techniques for evaluating the validity of websites are similar to those that are applied to evaluating any other source of information. Ask first about the source of the information. Is the domain a “.com” or “.ca” (business), “.gov” (government), or “.org” (nonprofit) entity? This information can help you determine the author’s (or organization’s) purpose in publishing the website. Try to determine where the information is coming from. Is the data being summarized from objective sources, such as journal articles or academic or government agencies? Does it seem that the author is interpreting the information as objectively as possible, or is the data being interpreted to support a particular point of view? Consider what groups, individuals, and political or commercial interests stand to gain from the site. Is the website potentially part of an advocacy group whose web pages reflect the particular positions of the group? Material from any group’s site may be useful, but try to be aware of the group’s purposes and potential biases.

Also, ask whether or not the authors themselves appear to be a trustworthy source of information. Do they hold positions in an academic institution? Do they have peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals? Many useful web pages appear as part of organizational sites and reflect the work of that organization. You can be more certain of the validity of the information if it is sponsored by a professional organization, such as the Canadian Psychological Association or the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Try to check on the accuracy of the material and discern whether the sources of information seem current. Is the information cited so that you can read it in its original form? Reputable websites will probably link to other reputable sources, such as journal articles and scholarly books. Try to check the accuracy of the information by reading at least some of these sources yourself.

It is fair to say that all authors, researchers, and organizations have at least some bias and that the information from any site can be invalid. But good material attempts to be fair by acknowledging other possible positions, interpretations, or conclusions. A critical examination of the nature of the websites you browse for information will help you determine if the information is valid and will give you more confidence in the information you take from it.

Key Takeaways

• Research is said to be valid when the conclusions drawn by the researcher are legitimate. Because all research has the potential to be invalid, no research ever “proves” a theory or research hypothesis.
• Construct validity, statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, and external validity are all types of validity that people who read and interpret research need to be aware of.
• Construct validity refers to the assurance that the measured variables adequately measure the conceptual variables.
• Statistical conclusion validity refers to the assurance that inferences about statistical significance are appropriate.
• Internal validity refers to the assurance that the independent variable has caused the dependent variable. Internal validity is greater when confounding variables are reduced or eliminated.
• External validity is greater when effects can be replicated across different manipulations, measures, and populations. Scientists use meta-analyses to better understand the external validity of research.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• The Pepsi-Cola Company, now PepsiCo Inc., conducted the “Pepsi Challenge” by randomly assigning individuals to taste either a Pepsi or a Coke. The researchers labelled the glasses with only an “M” (for Pepsi) or a “Q” (for Coke) and asked the participants to rate how much they liked the beverage. The research showed that subjects overwhelmingly preferred glass “M” over glass “Q,” and the researchers concluded that Pepsi was preferred to Coke. Can you tell what confounding variable is present in this research design? How would you redesign the research to eliminate the confound?
• Locate a research report of a meta-analysis. Determine the criteria that were used to select the studies and report on the findings of the research.

Campbell, D. T., & Stanley, J. C. (1963).  Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research . Chicago: Rand McNally.

Heine, S. J. (2010). Cultural psychology. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.),  Handbook of social psychology  (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1423–1464). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Nunnally, J. C. (1978).  Pyschometric theory . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Rosenthal, R., & Fode, K. L. (1963). The effect of experimenter bias on the performance of the albino rat.  Behavioral Science, 8 , 183–189.

Stangor, C. (2011).  Research methods for the behavioral sciences  (4th ed.). Mountain View, CA: Cengage.

• Adapted by J. Walinga. ↵

Introduction to Psychology - 1st Canadian Edition Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Walinga and Charles Stangor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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14   Research producers vs consumers | I-O

I-O: Optional independent reading. We will not cover this chapter in the lab class. We would however recommend to read this chapter in your own time.

In my view, Beth makes a very useful distinction between research producers and research consumers. Examples for research producers are researchers at universities, PhD students or undergraduate students conducting research projects. Examples for research consumers are clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, counsellors, organisational psychologists, and many other types of psychologists working in applied fields.

A Careers Destinations report published by the British Psychologcal Society (BPS) showed that only about 7% of psychology graduates work in scientific research and development:

If it is somewhat unlikely that you become a research producer, why should you care about research? Beth’s and my answer is that it is just as important to understand how research is produced if you are a research consumer. Why? In my view, applied psychology can only be as good as the research that underpins it. As an applied psychologist, you will need to make decisions, for example, you might need to decide what type of therapy to recommend to a client. (Even as a student, friends or family members might ask you for advice! 1 )

These recommendations should be based on scientific evidence. I would argue that as psychologists, we have a duty to make the best possible recommendations given current scientific evidence. To make these recommendations, a research consumer needs to be able to understand and critically analyse research. And to learn and improve on these skills, it is important to also have produced research. Therefore, we will focus on both critically analysing existing research as well as producing our own research in this module.

One of my teachers once said that hearing that you study psychology will divide people into two groups: Those who take a step forward, and those who take a step back. ↩︎