Do Student Samples Provide an Accurate Estimate of the General Public?

Most psychological studies rely on student samples. Students are usually considered as more homogenous than representative samples both within and across countries. However, little is known about the nature of the differences between student and representative samples. This is an important gap, also...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2016-12, Vol.11 (12), p.e0168354-e0168354
Main Authors: Hanel, Paul H P, Vione, Katia C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Attitude
Autonomy
Biology and Life Sciences
Democracy
Domestic violence
Female
General public
Health surveys
Humans
Hypotheses
Internet
Knowledge
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Methods
People and Places
Personality
Psychological aspects
Psychological Tests - standards
Psychology
Social Sciences
Socioeconomic factors
Students
Students - psychology
Students - statistics & numerical data
Studies
Values
Variables
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Most psychological studies rely on student samples. Students are usually considered as more homogenous than representative samples both within and across countries. However, little is known about the nature of the differences between student and representative samples. This is an important gap, also because knowledge about the degree of difference between student and representative samples may allow to infer from the former to the latter group. Across 59 countries and 12 personality (Big-5) and attitudinal variables we found that differences between students and general public were partly substantial, incoherent, and contradicted previous findings. Two often used cultural variables, embeddedness and intellectual autonomy, failed to explain the differences between both groups across countries. We further found that students vary as much as the general population both between and within countries. In summary, our results indicate that generalizing from students to the general public can be problematic when personal and attitudinal variables are used, as students vary mostly randomly from the general public. Findings are also discussed in terms of the replication crisis within psychology.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0168354