What EXACTLY do you do?

A picture of me at work. I am generally the first one there and the last one to leave. This day I was the ONLY one there; thus, I played with the camera on the computer.

More than once I have been asked by family and non-psychology friends what I actually do - both in general and here in Australia. I'm going to attempt to answer that question in this post, for both those friends/family but also myself as I question my next career move. 

Broadly, I am a researcher. I have been trained to find out the answers to questions in a systematic way, usually with the hopes of eliminating the bias of someone's opinion to get at the 'true' answer. My training has involved learning about theory (e.g., ideas about how relationships work), methodology (i.e., how do we test this question?), and statistics (i.e., how do we use numbers to see if we are right?). Typically, but not always, researchers work at a university as a professor. In this position, they conduct their research, teach courses, and share their research findings with the research community. 

Conducting research is done in a variety of ways, depending on your area of study. When I study families, for example, I might put up flyers in the community asking parents to call us if they are interested in helping with research. When they come into the laboratory I might observe them interacting or ask them to fill out questionnaires. Sharing findings is usually done by publishing in scientific journals (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine). Generally, the only people who have access to these journals are doctors in large hospitals and other professors at universities. The idea is that these professors then use this research to inform their own research and that doctors or other clinicians will use the research in their practice. If someone published, for example, that a certain drug was not effective in treating high blood pressure then doctors would (hopefully) stop prescribing that drug. 

The research that I am doing in Australia is quite interesting. Researchers here (social workers, MDs, and psychologists) were interested in how parents are affected when they have an infant born with congenital heart disease (CHD). They were mostly interested in how it affects the parents; That is, how do parents feel when they find out that their baby has CHD? How is their marriage affected? How is their relationship with the baby affected? Does it matter if they find out during the pregnancy versus after the baby is born? Does it matter if the baby has only one surgery compared to many? The data had already been collected before I arrived so now I get to just figure out the answers to these questions. I use statistics to answer the questions. That is, I look at relationships among characteristics of the parents and determine the likelihood that this relationships would be found again if someone collected this same information from other parents with infants with CHD. In one of the papers I am working on I am looking at the relationship between disease severity and the father-infant relationship. I have found that if the illness is more severe, the relationship suffers. The relationship is protected, however, if the father feels like he has high amounts of social support. 

Also - just thought I'd throw this in there- this is a picture of the meerkats at the hospital. I mentioned before that we have a lot of green spaces, an aquarium, and a meerkat habitat in the hospital, this is it!.