Originally Posted by Unregistered

Hi there! Im a psych post-grad student in NTU. Psychologist might have a couple of different meanings. A person who employs the knowledge of psychology in his field might often be called a 'psychologist'. But between psychologists ourselves, those people are not regarded as psychologist. For example, a psychology grad might be using her knowledge to work with a data mining company, but she is not a psychologist. Within the field, we usually regard psychologists as either clinical psychologists or research psychologist. Nowadays, companies hire teams of psychology grads to do research, unlike in the past whereby a sole person does research on the mind and/or behaviour. Hence, due to the difficulty and the level of expertise, only this sole individual would be considered a psychologist. In this day and age, a company that hires a team of psychology grads might call them psychologists, but their work usually comprises of big data and protocol work. Their research is based on group behaviours within a company or an organisation. In this case, we in the field dont usually call them psychologists, this is because research psychologist enhance the field by coming up with something new, not implementing some other idea or framework that has already been discovered. Its 2 different things. Data mining is not research in the academic sense. Research in the academic sense is about coming up with something that no one has thought of before, or reinforcing someone else's research. Taking that framework or idea and applying it to the real world is not what psychologists do.