Psychology Data

What Is Psychology Data?

Psychology, the study of the brain and behavior, generates vast amounts of data published in studies and collected in surveys. This data, as well as the metadata about it, make up the field of psychology data.

Where Does Psychology Data Come From?

Most psychological data comes from researchers publishing studies in peer-reviewed journals. However, there are also open-source databases that meet the same rigorous peer-reviewed standards.

It should be noted that not all of these psychological studies take place in a laboratory setting. Rather, many come from field research or surveys and polls sent out online. Researchers also use third-party data sources to create their studies, with information from censuses, wearable technology, passively-collected mobile phone data, and more.

What Types of Columns/Attributes Should I Expect When Working with This Data?

Attributes of psychology data are broad: even the species studied varies across studies! However, no matter whether the data consists of images of human faces, comments on social media, or levels of bacteria within the intestinal tracts of rats, researchers ensure the quality and consistency of their data before publication.

What Is This Data Used For?

Any aspect of human or animal life is improved with psychology data. However, most studies focus on human mood and behavior. Professionals in every industry can use psychology data to great positive effect.

How Should I Test the Quality of Psychology Data?

Since psychological studies must pass high standards before publication, even on open-source platforms, the quality of a single study should not be a concern. Rather, it is in the creation of a dataset or database for your own purposes that you may find trouble. Ensuring you collect all relevant studies for your purposes shouldn’t be too difficult with the wealth of sources available. Instead, focus should be on standardization and cleansing of the data collected.

Interesting Case Studies and Blogs to Look Into

American Psychological Association: Links to Data Sets and Repositories
Journal of Open Psychology Data

Tangible Examples of Impact

The automated analysis revealed that the algorithm was indeed able to successfully derive most of these personality traits from combinations of the multifarious elements of their smartphone usage. Moreover, the results provide hints as to which types of digital behavior are most informative for specific self-assessments of personality…The results of the study are of great value to researchers, as studies have so far been almost exclusively based on self-assessments. The conventional method has proven to be sufficiently reliable in predicting levels of professional success, for instance. “Nevertheless, we still know very little about how people actually behave in their everyday lives—apart from what they choose to tell us on our questionnaires,” says Markus Bühner. “Thanks to their broad distribution, their intensive use and their very high level of performance, smartphones are an ideal tool with which to probe the relationships between self-reported and real patterns of behavior.”

Medical Xpress: The most personal device: Researchers probe how much psychological data smartphones generate