By Biologists have their fruit flies and rats, psychologists have students. An overwhelming amount of behavioral science is conducted with young people at universities on the assumption that it’s safe to generalise from this species of human to people more generally. There are some common-sense reasons for thinking this might be a problem and also some more specific issues, which we’ve documented before, such as that burnt out students could be skewing the findings.
Now a recent study in PLOS One shows that the ways students differ from the public is different depending on which country you’re in, meaning it’s extra complicated to figure out if and when it’s appropriate to extrapolate student-based findings to people as a whole.
The researchers Paul Hanel and Katia Vione at Cardiff University used data collected from over 86,000 people (including 6,352 students) in 59 countries as part of the World Values Survey. They wanted to see if students differed from the general population on various measures, such as personality and trust in strangers, and if so, whether this was fairly constant across countries or varied according to whether a country was more individualistic or collectivist (either of which would make it easier to anticipate and account any for student-public differences when conducting research).
The researchers indeed found some notable differences between students and the general public, but perplexingly these differences often varied between countries and they weren’t explained by the key country characteristic of being individualistic vs. collectivist.
For instance, in Colombia students tended to score higher on Conscientiousness than the public, but in Brazil, the reverse was true. On the trait of Openness to Experience, students in China scored higher than the public, but in Pakistan students scored lower. The picture was similarly complex with people’s personal values and attitudes. For example, in New Zealand students showed heightened respect for the elderly compared with the public, but in Australia the opposite was found.
Hanel and Vione said their results “further support the claim that generalizing from students to the general public within personal and social psychology is problematic, at least while we do not know what predicts those differences.”
These new findings are somewhat disconcerting, but studies of this kind are also very welcome given that psychology’s dependence on student samples is unlikely to end any time soon. Crucially, the more we know about how students tend to differ from the public, the better placed we will be to interpret new student-based findings in an informed and considered way.
—Do Student Samples Provide An Accurate Estimate of The General Public?
Image under licence via gettyimages.co.uk
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest
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April 5, 2017 at 03:10AM
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