Astrologers actually do the kind of research you talk about. It's an ongoing thing and astrologers with large followings sometimes use social media to ask for ongoing feedback concerning such things.

There is a long-standing and ongoing interest in trying to find ways to categorize human personality traits and figure out how X interacts with Y. There are many systems for that. Astrology and Meyers-Briggs are just two of countless such attempts.

Here's a recent article called The Church of Interruption that actually has nothing to do with religion. It's about communication styles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21044009

There are people who believe in astrology as a kind of religious or spiritual thing and that belief system is basically that souls reincarnate and time and place of birth is chosen to correspond to soul states and life goals.

It's not necessary to believe in that to find astrology useful as a kind of "choose your own adventure" tool for thinking about yourself and how you relate to people.

You could think of it as the oldest and most fleshed out attempts to make personality categories based on long human observation that certain traits seem to very often go together.

Astrology uses a lot of provisional language that makes it easy for people to pick and choose what parts of the personality descriptors apply to them. You get a list of traits and you go "Why, yes, I am chatty and intellectual, but I'm not shallow. So most of these traits fit me and I find this makes sense."

It almost doesn't matter if there is any validity to planetary positions. You get a menu of things that kind of go together and I find that useful and haven't found anything else that provides a similarly useful menu to choose from.

So if it's a problem with a Saturn influence, Saturn rules both limitations, such as poverty, plus time and effort. You can accept your limitations or put in the time and effort to overcome them.

Maybe it's absolute bullshit and you can certainly come up with insights like "I can accept my limitations or work to overcome them" without astrology, but I find it useful.

Sociologists can find logical explanations for the value of religion in fostering a sense of community, etc, without accepting the tenets of any particular religion. Christians will be personally offended if you tell them God isn't real and they just go to church for a sense of community, but it's not actually necessary to draw any firm conclusions about whether or not God actually exists to see a valid role for religion in the lives of many people.

Same sort of thing is true for astrology.

From what I gather, astrology is a very popular subject in Japan, even though most Japanese aren't serious believers in astrology. In that case, it appears to be a socially acceptable means to indicate birth month in a culture that needs to know relative ages to determine appropriate honorifics to use in conversation when asking people their age is unforgivably rude.

So if you all go to school together, you know you are all born within about a year. Naming your sun sign is de facto naming your birth month, which helps sort who is older and who is younger without ever directly asking that question.

For many people outside of Japan, astrology serves a similar purpose of being a non threatening conversation starter. Not believing in it too earnestly actually makes it a better social tool because it makes it no more important than social exercises like asking "What's your favorite color?" and making up personality traits that go with that.