Careers in Mathematics
Is there any math in the field of psychology?
Hello Megan, There is indeed! When you talk about social sciences like Psychology a field of mathematics called Finite Math becomes very important. Finite Mathematics has categories you might already be familafamiliar statistics and probability. Statistics explains what's already gone on in the past, and probability tells you how likely it is to happen in the future. A couple of examples might help: When ever you say 'never' as in 'Mom, you never let me do anything,' that's a probabliprobabilitynt; whenever you've said anything about stuff that's happened in the past, that's a statistics statement - for example 'Dad, you always let suzie doSuzie' Another example, any time you've described something as beening being I've eaten half my dinner, or the cereal is half gone, that's a statistical statement, and since we've all used words like never, always, and half, I'm guessing you've already used some of this math! A little more technical. Finite math gives researchers, doctors, anybody really, a way to talk about how many times we can expect something to happen - in technical terms, how many events per period. So if you want to know how often or frequent (frequent refers to frequency which is a mathematical idea) something is going to happen you need math. Another example! Let's say you're a sucessful pssuccessfult, and you're writting a pwritingut a study you've been involved in, in fact you're not just involved you're running it! Let's say this study is about people with pets. You're interested in knowing how many people have a dog, a cat, more then one dog, more then one cat, some other type of pet, or no pet. So you have 6 categories you're studying. In your report you're going to need to be able to describe in easily understood teams, the results in each category. Taking the only a cat category first, in order to figure out what percentage of people have a single cat, you need to be able to take the total number of answers you have and divide that into the number of people who said they have a single cat - let's say this works out to one tenth (5 people out of 50 have only a cat - 5/50 = 0.1), multiplying that by 100% gives you 10%. This number is then a basic calculation of frequency, it would say that out of every 100 people, a percentage is all about how many times something specific will pop-out out of every 100 times it happens, 10 will have a cat and ONLY a cat. Even if you aren't planing on doiplanningarch and coming up with your own statistics, in order to understand what other psychologists are saying you're going to need to understand what these numbers mean! So math is very important. I hope this helps!