Quantitative Psychology at Carleton

What is Quantitative Psychology?

Quantitative Psychology, like other related areas in social science and education research, is a topic area concerned with asking questions about the methods and tools we use to answer questions about human behaviour and cognition. Quantitative Psychologists design new statistical tools for answering these questions, and they also conduct studies to probe the limitations of our existing tools. The American Psychological Association has a great summary of Quantitative Psychology here.

Careers in Quantitative Psychology

Did you know? Graduates with training in quantitative methods are in high demand. There are many career paths to Quantitative Psychology for students with Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and related social sciences. If you are fascinated by statistics, this path might be for you. In Canada, there are currently just six universities offering PhD degrees in Quantitative Psychology or Educational Measurement. Here at Carleton, you can complete an M.A. in Psychology as part of the Collaborative Data Science program. Our PhD students are also eligible to complete a Concentration in Quantitative Methods.

Quantitative Methods in the Department of Psychology

Our Department includes faculty members doing research and teaching about quantitative methods within our primary areas of study.

Craig Leth-Steensen is a cognitive psychologist who also specializes in psychometrics and continuous/categorical latent variable modeling. He is an expert in logistic regression and ANOVA techniques and also has interests in the areas of psychophysics, decision making, scaling, and neural networks.
Andrea Howard works in the areas of Developmental and Health Psychology and is an expert in methods for longitudinal and intensive repeated measures data analysis, measurement, and latent variable modeling.
Yan Liu focuses on the development and application of statistical models, including causal modeling (e.g., propensity score matching, mediation), structure equation modeling, and Bayesian mixed effects models, and works in the area of Health Psychology.

Our Department also offers a Statistical Consulting Service for psychology faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. Experts in Quantitative Psychology provide advice on study design, selecting appropriate analysis techniques, and troubleshooting data analyses, among other services.

Courses in Quantitative Methods

At the undergraduate level, we offer PSYC 2002 (Introduction to Statistics in Psychology) and PSYC 3000 (Advanced Design & Analysis). These courses offer a foundational background for pursuing more advanced topics at the graduate level. In their first year, our graduate students complete PSYC 5410 (Advanced ANOVA) and PSYC 5411 (Advanced Regression). In subsequent years, graduate students complete courses on a range of topics. In recent years these have included:

PSYC 5407 (Scale Development and Psychometrics)
PSYC 5414 (Structural Equation Modeling)
PSYC 5415 (Multilevel Modeling)
PSYC 5417 (Categorical Data Analysis)

…and special topics courses such as Data Visualization and Latent Class/Cluster Analysis.

PhD students in the Concentration in Quantitative Methods complete PSYC 6410, the Capstone Research Project in Quantitative Methods.