Psychological research in the past has always relied on people completing surveys and questionnaires. However, when relying on people to fill things out, most people are not completely honest about everything which can lead to misinformation and research conclusions. When asked on a form “do you smoke cigarettes, if so how often?” Many people are not going to be honest, they will answer the way they think they should. People always want to portray themselves as better than they really are, but with big data now being used more and more, people are not able to lie as easily about their everyday behaviors.
According to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, “every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” That is a lot of data, however if it is not analyzed properly and understood then it is useless. Since data analysis is fairly new, it will take a lot of time and people to sort through all the data that has been collected and make sense of it.
With all this data now available, it has the potential to change the way psychological scientists observe human behaviors. Big data means that the field of psychology can work faster, more efficiently, and reveal new things that they never thought was possible before. With the help of existing databases, wearable devices, social media, and smartphones, researchers are able to collect data that they never had access to before.
Michael Jones, a researcher at Indiana University Bloomington stated that, “each little piece of data is a trace of human behavior and offers us a potential clue to understanding basic psychological principles. But we have to be able to put all those pieces together correctly to better understand the basic psychological principles that generated them.” Jones is utilizing big data to help in his research on language development, specifically in infants and children.
“Big Data might help researchers get to a point where they can collect behavioral information without sampling human participants at all,” said Tanzeem Choudhury, an information scientist at Cornell University. As technology continues to advance, more and more data will be collected and eventually it will get to a point where researchers will get continuous updates of people’s behaviors and patterns. As a result, researchers will no longer have to bother people to fill out surveys and questionnaires, they will be methods of the past.
Tanzeem has been a part of a number of different developing smartphone apps that use big data to help with little everyday things to improve people’s lives. MyBehavior is one of the them, which looks at your physical activity patterns and then suggests ways to stay in shape. For example, taking hikes at locations that the person seems to enjoy. The next one that i thought was very interesting is called StressSense. This app will track where and when they experience the most stress throughout their day to help them avoid anxious situations. The last is called MoodRhythms which will help people who have bipolar to monitor social interactions and sleep to help maintain the person’s energy levels and keep their mood balanced throughout the day.
Big data can always be used by researchers to look at past research and get a fresh perspective on things. It could also help to support or abandon past theories and conclusions in the field of psychology. Researchers no longer have to rely on people’s word, the have clear data that is collected of behavior and patterns that may not line up with the things people say on paper. So it will help to get the raw truth.
Big data has been used a lot to help market and advertise brands and companies. However, it is really nice to hear that researchers and psychologists are able to utilize all this data that is collected in order to improve lives and make a bigger impact. Hopefully in the future, psychologists and researchers will be able to have all the information they need to prove ideas and theories not only in the future, but also for research that has been done in the past.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/
No comments:
Post a Comment