In psychology, and in the social sciences in general, much of the research conducted is performed by research institutions like Stanford University. Here at Stanford, and other colleges and universities like it, exists the largest and easiest sample of people to do research on: undergraduate college students. I found an article examining the legitimacy of generalizing college students to the general population in social sciences research. I think it yields some interesting results.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JCR/journal/issues/v28n3/280307/280307.web.pdf
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4 comments:
Gavin, thanks for posting this article! It's definitely an important issue for researchers and those consuming the research, as far as looking critically at the participant population demographics before making any broad generalizations on the results. We've touched on this issue frequently in our article discussions in class too. Ideally researchers would run their studies with various populations in order to make their claims stronger, but unfortunately it's tough to execute sometimes.
are studies often done with college students b/c of convenience? I agree it would be much better to have a broader age range for your test subjects if the researchers want to be really thorough. On the other hand, even if college students are about the same age they tend to vary is race, background, place of birth, etc. more than if you grabbed people off the street since universities often grab kids from all over.
I think colleges especially one like Stanford are a great place to get a broad range of subjects. I think that b/c of all the countries and different backgrounds people represent
Convenience is definitely a big factor. If every student who takes Intro. Psych. is required to participate in 6 hours of research, then psychologists get a lot of free subjects! Yes, there are certainly some problems, but for the most part, the results are pretty reliable. In a perfect world, we would get a completely representative sample of the entire world (not just the US population) for every study, but like Michelle said, that's really tough to do.
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