The ways that student samples differ from the public varies around the world

By Christian Jarrett 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 t...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Methods Personality Source Type: blogs