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Many students declare psychology as their major in college with the hopes of becoming a therapist, helping clients through their problems while they lie on the couch, and even opening their own private practice. For some, it is quite a rude awakening to discover that one of the required courses is statistics. Well, why in the world would a psychologist need to learn and master statistics?

What most students do not realize is that psychology is much more than simply talking clients through psychological or adjustment issues. This reflects just one aspect of psychology - the practice-oriented side. There are many psychologists and dozens of specializations that design research studies and use statistics in order to help others in a different way. Even practice-oriented psychologists in Clinical and Counseling Psychology may make use of statistics. How so?

Lets say that after a few years of treating clients who are coming in for marital counseling you develop a program to help build more effective communication and conflict resolution skills. After a few months of treatment, you’ve noticed a dramatic increase in your clients’ satisfaction with their marriages. You want to develop this program to help more clients than you can reach through your one office, but first you need to demonstrate with hard-core numbers that the program is effective. Now you find it necessary to design a study and use statistics to provide evidence that the program does indeed work. As a matter of fact, you may have former clients take a survey one year after treatment to estimate the long-term effect of your program. Can you see now how statistics would be necessary? Rather than paying thousands of dollars to complete this project, you have received all of the training you need in college to conduct the study yourself.

Even outside of the practice-oriented specializations of psychology, there are a number of psychologists who work at academic institutions, research organizations, and government agencies using statistics every single day. Statistics can be used to determine if the media indeed does cause children to exhibit violent behavior, whether a community service project causes people to develop stronger empathy skills, or even whether a new training program increases productivity within the workplace.

No matter what your interests or specialization in psychology, if you are planning on growing your career, you will need to learn and understand statistics. Believe it or not, those classes are far from useless. Statistics are essential to earn your diploma in psychology and perform as an effective psychologist.