How much statistics is there in clinical assistant psychologist roles?

hi, i'm a second year uni psychology student considering going into clinical. But i hate statistics and have seen it as something that i just need to 'get through' in my degree to be able to be a clinical psychologist. But when researching positions such as assistant psychologists the job descriptions include something like

'To undertake data collection, analysis, the production of reports and summaries, using IT and statistical programmes.'

Which sounds really daunting and not something i'd love to do if it's a big part of the role. I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge or experience about this and how much statistics i'd have to do in clinical psychology and assistant psychology roles? Thank you so much

hi, i'm a second year uni psychology student considering going into clinical. But i hate statistics and have seen it as something that i just need to 'get through' in my degree to be able to be a clinical psychologist. But when researching positions such as assistant psychologists the job descriptions include something like

'To undertake data collection, analysis, the production of reports and summaries, using IT and statistical programmes.'

Which sounds really daunting and not something i'd love to do if it's a big part of the role. I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge or experience about this and how much statistics i'd have to do in clinical psychology and assistant psychology roles? Thank you so much

AP roles vary quite a lot. The AP role I had involved hardly any research, and was more focused on setting up a new psychology provision, referral pathways, needs assessments and things like that. Other roles will be quite research heavy, and others may be a more balanced mix of different things.

If you plan to train as a Clinical Psychologist, both the training and the role once qualified are likely to involve significant amounts of research and statistics, but again how much exactly will depend on the types of services you work in.

Hi! Just to shadow the above comment, I would say the exact same thing! I'm currently a placement student working in 2 services (inpatient and outpatient) in a hospital and I would say it heavily varies. For example, the inpatient services is very patient-facing, and the assistant psychologist I work with does little to no statistics!

In the outpatient service, the assistant psychologist I worked with did a lot more research-heavy work, but it was a lot of work on Excel rather than other statistical programs such as SPSS.

On the other hand, there were placement students there in another service that did do SPSS work. So, it heavily varies!

From my understanding, different services have different needs. Some will focus more on service development auditing, whilst others may require assistant psychologists to undertake more practical work.

Hope that's helped!

~ Fatiha, Cardiff Uni Student Rep

Hi thank you this has been very helpful! When you talk about service development auditing could you provide some more insight into what that is?

Thank you this is really helpful. Would you be able to recommend any services that you know of that are less data science heavy?

So as you probably know, psychologists (or the multi-disciplinary teams they work in, if you're in health psychology) provide a certain service to patients. Audits are basically research looking into how effective these services are. For example, they might be looking at how effective their group therapy sessions are. I'd say it's pretty much the same processes as you would have done in university/academic research (data collection, data entry, analysis, report).

Hope that's explained it!

~ Fatiha, Cardiff Uni Student Rep

Sadly this will differ a lot depending on the psychologist you work for. Some love quant data, others avoid it if they can (well not all data but some bits). Either way you will need and use a lot of these skills most days, as you need them for anaylsing measures and tests. You cant totally avoid data, so work on getting good at it if you want to be in this career (you will need it for the doctorate at the very least) and other professionals will need your expertise also. Psychologists are scientist practitioners for a reason, we need both hard (evaluation, critical anaylsis, confidence with complex data) and soft skills (talking, therapy etc).

I would say though that you often wont be doing high level interpretations and data collections unless you have active research, so it is manageable.

The Assistant Psychologists in our service (NHS Adult Mental Health) are required to be competent at data collection, statistics, analysis and data presentation. That includes SPSS and Excel. The qualified clinical psychologists direct the work, check it and sign it off, but the assistants do the work. They are heavily involved with administration but also have some clinical work, which usually is augmenting the work of the Band 7s and upwards.

We test for this as part of our interview procedure, and it has become the best way to determine both who is succesful in role but also who goes onto a DClinPsy afterwards. I think this is because our AP jobs are built on (and develop) the competencies that most DClinPsy programmes look for. From my own memories, it is incredibly tough to get through a DClinPsy if you are weak at research as it is a doctoral programme, and some courses will even have exams around this skillset.

Though I qualified nearly a long time ago and am a head of service, but I still use stats. If you don't know your research methods it can limit your progression once you are qualified and practicing as a psychologist, and you may not be take that seriously in specific contexts. You may be able to sit in a therapy heavy role in your early career, but above Band 8a jobs (and even for those roles) you are going to be managing teams and working with data to justify your service, your key performance indicators and the development of that service. If you don't know data and statistics that is going to be nearly impossible.