Psychology is the study of the mind and behaviour in humans and animals, both in academic research and professional practice. It can be divided into many sub-disciplines, such as clinical, occupational, or forensic psychology, and cross over into other subject areas, such as neuroscience.
The Psychology Community Gateway hosts research outputs focusing on Psychology and related disciplines, including health and clinical psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, social psychology, and sports psychology. Dr Emma Norris, Senior Lecturer in Public Health at Brunel University, UK, is a co-Advisor of the Psychology Community Gateway in Open Research Europe, steering the growth and strategic direction of the Gateway.
We spoke to Dr. Emma Norris about her work and the challenges psychology researchers face.
What is your area of research, and how does it relate to the Psychology Community Gateway?
My research focuses on the development and evaluation of health behaviour change interventions based on health psychology theory. I also work on metascience projects to assess and improve levels of Open Research practices within psychology and public health. Health psychology is one of the key topics covered by the Psychology Gateway.
What are the biggest challenges of being a researcher in your field?
Within health behaviour change, details on interventions developed and delivered are historically poor: they lack detail on what, how, who, and why interventions were provided. This makes it extremely difficult to replicate effective interventions and truly understand what works. Steps to improve reporting specificity using tools such as taxonomies and ontologies have been developed, but work to implement broader adoption remains ongoing.
What are the important topics in your field?
For me, key topics in health psychology are how we can better synthesise the evidence on effective health interventions to provide optimal effectiveness of future interventions. A more recently emerging area is the application of health behaviour change theory to environmental issues.
How do you think open science practices could benefit your field of research?
I believe that open materials, allowing expanded sharing of intervention details, are hugely underutilised within health psychology currently. Open data, especially qualitative health psychology research, is still largely unshared following FAIR Principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability).
Are there any key challenges when it comes to participating in open science that are specific to your research area?
I believe that a key challenge to engaging with open science with health psychology and behaviour change is the wide range of data collected. Much data in the field is qualitative (e.g. interviews and observations), where considerations of FAIR data Principles can be much more complex, especially with patient populations.
Open Research Europe has adopted a forward-thinking open data policy, which addresses the challenges that many psychology researchers face when sharing their data. This policy enables authors to share their research data—both qualitative and quantitative—when publishing their articles in accordance with the FAIR Principles. To learn more about sharing your qualitative data openly and safely, please read this blog post. In addition to implementing an open data policy, Open Research Europe supports the publication of over 10 types of articles, including Data Notes. Data Notes are descriptions of scholarly datasets that help others understand and reuse the data and materials you created or collected. Publishing a Data Note can make the underlying data of your research even more discoverable and reusable.
Learn more about the Psychology Community Gateway and the benefits of publishing with Open Research Europe.
