Do Student Samples Provide an Accurate Estimate of the General Public?
Do Student Samples Provide an Accurate Estimate of the General Public?
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0168354
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发表时间：
2016-12-21
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Vione, Katia C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hanel, Paul H. P.;Vione, Katia C.
大多数心理学研究依赖于学生样本。学生通常被认为比国家内部和国家之间的代表性样本更同质化。然而，很少有人知道学生和代表性样本之间的差异的性质。这是一个重要的差距，也是因为对学生和代表性样本之间差异程度的了解可能允许从前者到后者进行推断。在59个国家和12个人格（大五）和态度变量中，我们发现学生和公众之间的差异部分是实质性的，不连贯的，与以前的研究结果相矛盾。两个经常使用的文化变量，嵌入性和智力自主性，未能解释这两个群体之间的差异在不同国家。我们进一步发现，学生在国家之间和国家内部的差异与一般人群一样大。总之，我们的研究结果表明，一般从学生到公众可能是有问题的，当使用个人和态度变量，因为学生的变化大多是随机的，从公众。研究结果也讨论了心理学内的复制危机。
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.