Self-selection biases in psychological studies: Personality and affective disorders are prevalent among participants

Respondents select the type of psychological studies that they want to participate in consistence with their needs and individual characteristics, which creates an unintentional self-selection bias. The question remains whether participants attracted by psychological studies may have more psychologi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2023-03, Vol.18 (3), p.e0281046
Main Authors: Kaźmierczak, Izabela, Zajenkowska, Anna, Rogoza, Radosław, Jonason, Peter K, Ścigała, Dawid
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affective disorders
Analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
Care and treatment
Comorbidity
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Data collection
Diagnosis
Female
Humans
Hypotheses
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mental disorders
Mood Disorders - psychology
Narcissism
Pandemics
Personality
Personality disorders
Personality Disorders - epidemiology
Personality traits
Psychologists
Psychology, Pathological
Psychopathology
Research and Analysis Methods
Selection Bias
Signs and symptoms
Social Sciences
Students
Volunteers
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Summary:Respondents select the type of psychological studies that they want to participate in consistence with their needs and individual characteristics, which creates an unintentional self-selection bias. The question remains whether participants attracted by psychological studies may have more psychological dysfunctions related to personality and affective disorders compared to the general population. We investigated (N = 947; 62% women) whether the type of the invitation (to talk about recent critical or regular life events) or the source of the data (either face-to-face or online) attracts people with different psychopathology. Most importantly, participants who alone applied to take part in paid psychological studies had more symptoms of personality disorders than those who had never before applied to take part in psychological studies. The current results strongly translate into a recommendation for either the modification of recruitment strategies or much greater caution when generalizing results for this methodological reason.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0281046