Why communicating research is harder than doing it
This week I took part in our School's annual PhD poster presentation. It's an event I've attended before, but this year felt a little different because it marked the end of my third year as a PhD student. Looking around the room, I realised just how much work had accumulated over the last three years, not just for me but for everyone presenting.
One thing that struck me while putting my poster together was that creating a poster isn't really about designing a poster at all. It's about deciding what deserves to be included. Over the past year alone I've collected and analysed data, spent countless hours reading papers, revised chapters more times than I care to admit and thought about my research almost every day. Trying to condense all of that into something someone can understand in five minutes is surprisingly difficult.
As researchers, we spend so much time becoming familiar with our own topic that we stop noticing how specialised our language becomes. Terms that feel completely ordinary to us can sound incredibly technical to someone outside our field. Even something as simple as "attentional focus" means very little until you explain why it matters. That made me think quite differently about the purpose of the poster - it wasn't there to show everything I'd done. It was there to tell a story.
For me, that story centred on a fairly simple question: what affects performance under pressure in dancers, and what can we do to help? The statistical models, questionnaires and analyses are obviously important, but they aren't what people remember. People remember the problem you're trying to solve. I think that's something academia could probably do more of. Researchers often spend years becoming experts in incredibly specific topics, but ultimately our work has very little impact if we can't explain it beyond our immediate field. Most people aren't interested in the details of a regression model, but they are interested in why dancers experience performance anxiety, or how psychology might help performers enjoy what they do a little more.
Those conversations were probably my favourite part of the afternoon. The audience included staff and students from across psychology and neuroscience, many of whom don't work in sport or performance psychology. That meant the questions were often different from the ones I'd expect from people working directly in my area. Rather than asking about a particular analysis or theoretical framework, people wanted to know why I chose dancers, how the findings might be applied in practice, and what I hope the research will achieve in the long term.
Those are good questions. They're also the kinds of questions that can get lost when you're immersed in day-to-day research. It's easy to become focused on the next chapter or the next analysis and forget to step back and ask why the work matters in the first place. Preparing the poster forced me to do exactly that. It also reminded me that communicating research isn't just something you do at the end of a project. It's a skill in its own right. Whether you're writing a thesis, giving a talk, designing a poster or simply explaining your work to someone outside academia, you're constantly making decisions about what to include, what to leave out and how to make complex ideas accessible without oversimplifying them. I don't think that's easy, and I'm not sure it's something we talk about enough.
By the end of the afternoon, I realised I'd spent far less time discussing statistics than I expected. Instead, I'd had conversations about dance, performance, confidence and performance anxiety. Those are the things people naturally connect with, and they provide a much more accessible way into the research than a table of results ever could. For me, that's probably the biggest takeaway from this year's poster session. The research itself is obviously important, but learning how to communicate it clearly is every bit as valuable. After all, good research only has an impact if people can understand it.
