The Matriculated aren’t like You and Me

Posted on August 11, 2007 in Psycho-bunk

A report from the Associated Press indicates that too many studies are using college students as “guinea pigs” and it’s skewing results:

A review of the literature and a few independent checks on the validity of these results show that the use of this population may misrepresent how the rest of us feel.”What if you studied 7-year-old kids and made inferences about geriatrics?” asks Robert Peterson, a marketing professor at the University of Texas, Austin. “Everyone would say you can’t do that. But you can use these college students.”

Prof. Peterson scoured the literature for examples of studies that examined the same psychological relationships in students and nonstudents. In almost half of the 63 relationships he examined, there were major discrepancies between students and nonstudents: The two groups either produced contradictory results, or one showed an effect at least twice as great as the other.

In a follow-up study, not yet published, Prof. Peterson demonstrated that even college students are far from homogeneous. With help from faculty at 58 schools in 31 states, he surveyed undergraduate business students across the country and found that they vary widely from school to school. That means a professor studying the relationship between students’ attitudes toward capitalism and business ethics at one school could reach a sharply different conclusion than a professor at another school.

“People have always been aware of this issue,” Prof. Peterson says, but many have chosen to ignore it. A 1986 paper by David Sears, a UCLA psychology professor, documented the increased use of college students for research in the prior quarter century and explored the potential biases that might introduce. In the meantime, the use of college students has, if anything, risen, researchers say.

I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to measure the degree to which college students try to throw off the studies intentionally by making wild claims and statements of belief? I know that it was tempting to me at times, particularly if the study had a political ax to grind.

Photo: University researcher grilling student subjects as part of an experiment.

[tags]psychological testing, psychological studies, psychology studies, social psychology, psychology, guinea pigs, experimentation, psychological experimentation, college, students, college students, bizarre, psycho-bunk[/tags]