3 Steps to Conduct Your Psychological Research Easier
Everybody knows that the business needs and uses data visualization all the time. No matter if it is an Excel sheet or a promotional video; tables, bars and pie charts are used to tell the tale in the data–and most companies are in need of an easy-to-use and powerful tool. What is less obvious, but not less important, is the usage of data visualization in the area of science.
Research wouldn’t make any sense if there was no clear way to present what you discovered, right? I will try to show you how a custom data visualization tool could boost the work of a research psychologist.
1. CATALOG ALL YOUR TESTS
Psychology has thousands of sub-divisions and millions of methodologies—the most common of which are still pen and paper surveys in which respondents fill all kinds of information.
The biggest problem that most of the researchers face is the identification of the correct tools. Which to use to measure willingness to take financial risk? What are the tools that indicate a person’s level of kindness?
In this case the most helpful thing might be a well-organized and easy-to-navigate library of tests. The researcher would find the area he/she is interested in and then browse through the tests that match his needs. The tests could have multiple tags and appear in different departments at once, on different levels of complexity. Do you want to check intelligence? Here’s what we have on that. You need to focus on the crystalized intelligence in particular? Here you are. Choose the most suitable tests, set them in order, and you’re ready to start the research.
2. USE ONE GRAPHIC DESIGN FOR ALL YOUR TESTS
Some tests, like Raven’s Progressive Matrices, have to be performed in the original, trademarked way because of the standardization process, but most of them can be adapted to the design that may be chosen in the data visualization tool to bring better clarity to the respondent. Using GoJS diagrams, in this case, would allow us to maximize the clarity of the test, which is significant for the results to be reliable.
Developing such a tool within GoJS would actually make even more sense. If, in future, someone constructs their own test, they can then use the standard template from the tool’s constructor section, so all the tests are aligned by default.
Anybody, who has ever taken part in psychological tests will tell you that such unification would be a perfect adjustment. Anyone, who has ever run one, will simply love the idea.
3. GET YOUR STATISTICS IMMEDIATELY
Once you gather the respondents (either online or by approaching them with a tablet or a laptop), you need to count the results and provide analysis on them. That could be the most helpful functionality of your custom data visualization tool, providing relevant statistics in just few clicks. Your research findings would be presented in a clear way, ready to publish in an article. No more struggling with those complex UX nightmares we call statistics calculators. The information is made clear, is well-organized and is ready to copy to a report.
At this point you are ready to start the Results and Discussion part of the research–way ahead of anyone using the traditional methods.
DATA VISUALIZATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH
I’ve worked with our graphic designer to help you imagine how a custom data visualization could look.
The tool would operate on GoJS – the JavaScript library for data visualization. It enables the developers to create an application tailored to the needs of almost every industry.
The main component of the psychological research app would be the test library. The tests would be organized by categories. It would be possible to browse and filter the results by both major and more detailed psychological constructs.
In the separate tab you would find several test templates of varying design and complexity.
The app would be equipped with an analytical tool that would calculate the results, show them on diagrams, and generate reports which would be easy to fit into your article.
To conclude, such a tool would be able to make a researcher’s life easier at every step—from defining the research to publishing it. I’m pretty sure all of the scientists would be happy to use it to solve currently faced problems and save time.
WHO NEEDS THE APP?
In its basic form, it’s an ideal tool for universities or research centers with which they could gather all the tests they have rights to use. Thinking bigger, if large scientific libraries or databases featured such a tool on their website, so all subscribers could use it, this could literally change the psychology scientific world we know today. And this is what I am hoping to see some time soon.
Read more about how data visualization can help your business. And check out the stories of the applications we already created.
