Legion, I did some research on employment data of psychologists.
I was focusing primarily on psychology although you referred often to the people themselves, the psychologists. And every time I brought up psychology as applied to some form of human health, you seemed to distance psychology from it, or implicitly proposed by your questions or comments that it is some tiny subset of it. That's not the case, quantitatively; it's the largest subset by far.
For example, if I go the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the U.S. and look up "Psychologist", here is the page. This is their main descriptor: "Psychologists study mental processes and human behavior by observing, interpreting, and recording how people and other animals relate to one another and the environment." and then they go on to describe the various subsets. If you go to the "similar occupations" tab, it lists things like archeologists, marketing analysts, counselors, physicians, survey researchers, social workers, etc.
They break the field down into four main subsets for recording purposes:
1) Clinical, Counseling and School Psychologists
Total employment: 103,590
The largest subset of this group is in primary and secondary schools, followed by healthcare providers of various types.
2) Psychology Teachers, Post-Secondary
Total employment: 38,060
This includes people that teach psychology full time (including the healthcare related types and non-healthcare types), and those that do a combination of teaching and research (into health care and non-health care categories).
3) Industrial-Organizational Psychologists
Total employment: 1,030
These are the marketing and human resource psychologists, and related fields.
4) Psychologists, All Other
Total employment: 10,350
The biggest chunk here is the 6,000+ federal psychologists, and there are more healthcare psychologists in this group too.
Alternatively, we can look at the American Psychological Association, which has 56 divisions for types of psychology. Going through the list, about half of the divisions are related to applied human health, with a margin of inaccuracy because some are probably debatable.
People from other countries can report other national data if they wish.
From all this, overall I'd say that the bulk of identified psychologists, at least in the United States, are doing applied psychology to help people with various behavioral, medical, developmental and other problems. And then another chunk of the remainder is involved in the teaching of those sorts of mental-health and behavioral related programs, or doing research in health-related psychology. The chunk that's left behind after all that, in the fields of non-health related academic psychology research, business psychology research, and so forth, are the type you seem to predominantly refer to. And then of course, out of that remaining group, many of them are blending neuroscience, neuroendocrinology, computational science, and related fields into it, and therefore the science part of that smaller subset is shared with these more physical research areas.
So how many psychologists are practicing psychology at an empirical level that would be comparable to chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, applied physics, biochemistry, etc? It seems to be a pretty small subset, and much of that subset overlaps with neuroscience and other fields. So I'll reiterate the earlier point I made, that psychology in general is not studied or practiced as hard science. It has various uses, of course.
So for example, if the question is something like, "Does Robert Sapolsky, who spent 25+ years studying social behavior of baboons, practice science?" I'd say he certainly does, especially because his doctorate is in neuroendocrinology and his practices include things like taking blood samples to measure cortisol levels of baboons under various conditions. If that's the kind of person we're talking about, then I'd say he's a scientist clearly, but that it's a neuroendocrionologist who does of course include psychology by definition in his work. Are you thinking of academics like that and counting them as psychologists, or referring to that field as psychology? If so then that would be the area of our disagreement on terms so far.
I was focusing primarily on psychology although you referred often to the people themselves, the psychologists. And every time I brought up psychology as applied to some form of human health, you seemed to distance psychology from it, or implicitly proposed by your questions or comments that it is some tiny subset of it. That's not the case, quantitatively; it's the largest subset by far.
For example, if I go the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the U.S. and look up "Psychologist", here is the page. This is their main descriptor: "Psychologists study mental processes and human behavior by observing, interpreting, and recording how people and other animals relate to one another and the environment." and then they go on to describe the various subsets. If you go to the "similar occupations" tab, it lists things like archeologists, marketing analysts, counselors, physicians, survey researchers, social workers, etc.
They break the field down into four main subsets for recording purposes:
1) Clinical, Counseling and School Psychologists
Total employment: 103,590
The largest subset of this group is in primary and secondary schools, followed by healthcare providers of various types.
2) Psychology Teachers, Post-Secondary
Total employment: 38,060
This includes people that teach psychology full time (including the healthcare related types and non-healthcare types), and those that do a combination of teaching and research (into health care and non-health care categories).
3) Industrial-Organizational Psychologists
Total employment: 1,030
These are the marketing and human resource psychologists, and related fields.
4) Psychologists, All Other
Total employment: 10,350
The biggest chunk here is the 6,000+ federal psychologists, and there are more healthcare psychologists in this group too.
Alternatively, we can look at the American Psychological Association, which has 56 divisions for types of psychology. Going through the list, about half of the divisions are related to applied human health, with a margin of inaccuracy because some are probably debatable.
People from other countries can report other national data if they wish.
From all this, overall I'd say that the bulk of identified psychologists, at least in the United States, are doing applied psychology to help people with various behavioral, medical, developmental and other problems. And then another chunk of the remainder is involved in the teaching of those sorts of mental-health and behavioral related programs, or doing research in health-related psychology. The chunk that's left behind after all that, in the fields of non-health related academic psychology research, business psychology research, and so forth, are the type you seem to predominantly refer to. And then of course, out of that remaining group, many of them are blending neuroscience, neuroendocrinology, computational science, and related fields into it, and therefore the science part of that smaller subset is shared with these more physical research areas.
So how many psychologists are practicing psychology at an empirical level that would be comparable to chemistry, chemical engineering, physics, applied physics, biochemistry, etc? It seems to be a pretty small subset, and much of that subset overlaps with neuroscience and other fields. So I'll reiterate the earlier point I made, that psychology in general is not studied or practiced as hard science. It has various uses, of course.
So for example, if the question is something like, "Does Robert Sapolsky, who spent 25+ years studying social behavior of baboons, practice science?" I'd say he certainly does, especially because his doctorate is in neuroendocrinology and his practices include things like taking blood samples to measure cortisol levels of baboons under various conditions. If that's the kind of person we're talking about, then I'd say he's a scientist clearly, but that it's a neuroendocrionologist who does of course include psychology by definition in his work. Are you thinking of academics like that and counting them as psychologists, or referring to that field as psychology? If so then that would be the area of our disagreement on terms so far.
