Dr. Wayne Podrouzek, Psychology Degree, Research Expansion, and Incentives
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/01
Dr. Wayne Podrouzek works as an Instructor for the Psychology Department of University of the Fraser Valley and instructor in the Psychology Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Dr. Podrouzek earned his a Bachelor of Arts in Child Studies and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from Mount Saint Vincent University, a Master of Arts from Simon Fraser University, and Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University under Dr. Bruce Whittlesea. Here is part 2 of an interview from a few years ago.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Many students graduating with a Psychology degree will not pursue careers in Psychology. What are your thoughts on this?
Dr. Wayne Podrouzek: That’s great – I think society needs people who have the broad understanding of the principles of psychology in a wide variety of positions. Psychologists tend to be quite well trained in methodology and stats, and this certainly enhances their ability to think about things methodological – certainly one of the pillars of good critical thinking.
Perhaps some of those folks with a good educational underpinning in critical thinking could go into politics? That would be awesome. It would be good to have some folks in government who can actually think.
Psychology interfaces well with Law: Again, the methodological and thinking skills can be brought to bear.
Jacobsen: Kwantlen is attempting to expand that research on campus. What are the current attempts to expand research on campus? What is the progress of those attempts?
Podrouzek: I know there is a real push to expand research at Kwantlen. Outside of Psych, I’m afraid I’m not very knowledgeable about what’s going on. However, in the psych department, we have many faculties who have active research programs, within Kwantlen and in collaborating with other universities and agencies. Several have international reputations. Given the level of funding, and our workload in teaching and service, I am pretty impressed with the level of research many of faculty in psych are managing.
Jacobsen: If Kwantlen provided incentives via funding (grants), would you be interested in conducting research at Kwantlen?
Podrouzek: Grants might be nice – along with time release for doing research. However, in my case, a lot of what I need is tech support. Many of the kinds of experiments I want to do require substantial expertise in programming and integrating output from different technologies. I haven’t done any programming for over 20 years now, and everything has changed (and what I did then was on MAC), and I don’t really have the inclination to take a year or two to learn to do it well. I have quite a few (I think) fairly good ideas for studies, but without substantial tech support, I’m afraid, I won’t be the one to be doing them.
And, I’m getting a tad long in the tooth to retool for a substantial research career. It would likely take me 1-2 years to get up to speed in a new area, and that pretty much puts me at retirement age. So, I just like doing what I think is interesting “stuff” with like-minded students, at a very pedestrian pace assumptions, change your methods, and you change your field. Things loosened up considerably. Areas of enquiry and the acceptable methods and what could count as reasonable data become much more encompassing, and thus new areas of psychology emerged. We certainly didn’t have courses on sex, for example, or prejudice, cultural, gender (other than straight up sex differences, other aspects of that field would have been taught in “Women’s Studies”), and the list goes ever on.
When I attended university there were upper level specialty courses in Psycholinguistics (Chomsky) – a brilliant, complex theory of language (particularly, syntax and transformations, and semantics), Piaget and Vygotsky, behaviour, modification (applied behavior analysis), parallel and distributed processing, and other things that are now of historical interest, but at the time were all the rage.
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