What does a Psychology Technician Do? A Day in the Life

Elaine Watson

Often, my friends ask me, “what does a technician do?” Well the truth is fairly varied and as the academic year moves on the role changes on a day to day, week to week basis. I am an Applied Psychology Technician, supporting students from the Psychology and Applied Psychology undergraduate, MSc and PhD programmes through their time at the University of Cumbria (UoC). Ok then, what does that mean, how do I support students? 

Today, I arrived into work, checked my emails and responded to the requests I had had since yesterday, students don’t work office hours! 

After I have dealt with the email queries, I go to the first booking for today. It is to record student presentations for one of the MSc modules. The recordings are for the External Examiner. I take a video recorder, tripod and extension cable to the lecture room and set up to make sure that I can get the screen and the student in the frame. Presentations are often part of student assessment and marks count towards their final grade, nerves can kick in and many people find presenting pretty scary. I try to make the recording of the presentations as relaxed and low key as possible by talking to the students and making sure they are comfortable with how I have things set up. Once the recordings are finished I go back to the office and upload the recordings onto the UoC Helix Media Server. This is a server where large video files are stored securely, a link is created by the server which can be used to access the footage. When uploading the files to Helix Media I have to ensure that privacy settings are created to ensure that the link is secure and only accessed by authorised persons. Once the recordings are uploaded onto Helix Media the link is emailed to me. I then upload the link onto the External Examiners Blackboard site. That’s the first job for today complete. 

My next booking is with a third year undergraduate student wanting to use Bristol Online Survey as a data collection method for their dissertation. For those who have read my blogs before, online surveys are one of my lead subject areas; I induct students onto the Bristol Online Survey (BOS) tool ensuring that any surveys created meet ethical standards and comply with British Psychological Society guidelines on internet mediated research. Inductions last usually around an hour, after which students can go on to complete the survey design themselves. However, some surveys are more complex and require more technical input, for instance when using routing and applying BOS logic (this takes the participant to another part of the survey if they answer a question in a particular way). This is when students come back to me for the next step in survey design, to ensure the survey is mapped out correctly and exports into SPSS (a statistical analysis package) correctly . Today’s survey was fairly straightforward, although I did learn a way of adding logic that I haven’t used before! 

Finally today, I am planning and creating a critical thinking workshop using newspaper articles about recently published research studies. According to the study “Beer can be a talking point” a pint of beer can actually boost your language skills! I’m looking forward to reading this article and then critically thinking about it. Asking questions of the article such as, Who, Why, When, and Where? Then considering if the researchers have their own agenda, are the researchers experts in this particular research area or has an organisation paid for the research, if so could the research benefit the organisation? Working through these questions as a process when reading articles and journals can all help you to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a piece of work or research.  

Dissertation Library

While working on the workshop, I have a student drop in to ask if they can look through the library of past dissertations we look after, they are looking for quantitative methods dissertations, mixed topics. We take the boxes of dissertations into the Student Laboratory and work through them until we find ones that are either a relevant subject area or using similar methodology, study design or statistical analysis, in this case it was multiple regression. 

Well there you have it, a very brief explanation of a day in the life of an Applied Psychology Technician!

If you'd like to find out more about any of the services our technicians provide, please email them on: psychology-tsu@cumbria.ac.uk