Lubomir,
The authors made precisely this point.
Section 2.1, paragraph 2 on p. 3 reads:
"Even within the West, however, the typical sampling method for
experimental studies is far from representative. In the *Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology*, the premier journal in social
psychology – the subdiscipline of psychology that should (arguably) be the
most attentive to questions about the subjects’ backgrounds – 67% of the
American samples (and 80% of the samples from other countries) were
composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (Arnett 2008). In
other words, a randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4,000
times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected
person from outside of the West. Furthermore, this tendency to rely on
undergraduate samples has not decreased over time (Peterson 2001; Wintre et
al. 2001). Such studies are therefore sampling from a rather limited
subpopulation within each country (see Rozin 2001)."
In section 6 on pp. 16–18, the authors return to this point, and
systematically explain:
- how heavily social scientists have relied on data gathered from American
undergraduates,
- how anomalous American undergraduates are compared to the US population
as a whole (which is *itself* highly anomalous, as the authors meticulously
documented in sections 3, 4, and 5), and
- why it would therefore be unwise to assume that the conclusions that
social science researchers have drawn from their studies of American
undergraduates hold true for all Westerners or even all Americans, much
less for other people around the world.
I hope you will read the article. I think you would enjoy it.
Best wishes,
Carma
*CARMA GORMAN, Ph.D., *Associate Professor (she/her/hers)
The University of Texas at Austin | Department of Design
School of Design & Creative Technologies | College of Fine Arts
512-471-0901 | ART 1.218 | designcreativetech.utexas.edu
On Sun, May 23, 2021 at 1:26 PM Lubomir Savov Popov <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Dear Carma,
>
> The sampling is actually far worst. Professors use their students as
> research subjects. Thus the actual population studied is only a fraction of
> the country.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Lubomir
>
>
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