VISUALIZING THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THREE FIELDS OF PSYCHOLOGY USING NETWORK ANALYSIS

The purpose of this research is to create a visual representation of the relationships and interactions between the fields of personality, industrial/organizational, and human factors psychology. References were pulled from select chapters of two different handbooks, the forthcoming SAGE Handbook of Personality and Individual Differences and the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Psychology, in order to create a network structure that graphically illustrated the connections between the authors and their specific topics. This structure was then compared to a pre-prepared network that was created by hand of the expectations for what the network should look like based solely on the chapter readings. The software programs of R and Gephi were used for the creation of these network structures. From this research, the importance of these methods, namely, the creation a detailed map of a scientific field, was deduced and expanded upon.