Psychologists' response to criticisms about research based on undergraduate participants: A developmental perspective

Canadian Psychology,  Aug 2001  by Maxine Gallander Wintre,  Christopher North,  Lorne A Sugar

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Abstract

Historically, psychologists have expressed concern about the overreliance on undergraduates as research participants in the discipline. Moreover, the last 25 years have witnessed a boom in research on adolescence as a time of continuing developmental change in a variety of domains and significant life transitions. Given the above criticism and new prolific area of research, the present study examines whether employing undergraduates as a surrogate adult sample has decreased in the psychology literature since the mid-1970s. All articles published in six prestigious journals (representing five subdivisions of psychology) were investigated for 1975, 1985, and 1995. Of the 1,719 articles coded, 68.31 % were found to employ undergraduates exclusively as subjects. There were no significant decreases in the use of undergraduate research participants from 1975 to 1995. Other methodological problems, including reports of descriptive statistics for age, recruiting techniques, and statements referring to the limited generalizability of the findings, are also examined.

As we put closure on the 20th century, psychologists can be proud of a discipline that has thrived and flourished. However, as the discipline strives to maturity, one area of concern has been the need to address poignant criticisms of the use of undergraduate students as the predominant research participants in the field.

To date we have witnessed criticisms of the over-use of undergraduate participants (e.g., chronologically, Christie, 1965; Smart, 1966; Adelson, 1969; Schultz, 1969; Higbee & Wells; 1972), the accumulated evidence that undergraduate students are neither representative of adults, adolescents, or the university population collectively, and the burgeoning developmental research on adolescence. The present paper assesses whether these criticisms and empirical findings have been assimilated into the general practice of employs ing undergraduates as research participants in psychology studies over the past 20-25 years.

Historical Trends Concerning Undergraduates as Research Participants

Concerns about an inappropriate reliance on undergraduate research participants emerged in 1965 (See Table 1 for a summary). Christie (1965) reported in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (jAsp) that the proportion of studies with undergraduate participants for the years 1949 to 1959 had more than doubled (increasing from 20% to 49%).

Smart (1966) believed the overuse of undergraduate research participants should prompt researchers to ask themselves if they know what is "going on, psychologically, in the big world beyond the university" (p. 121). Other psychologists asserted that "college students are hardly a random sample of all humanity" (Myers, 1983, p. 32). Although some psychologists believe "that many research areas (e.g., perception) produce outcomes relatively unaffected by the special characteristics of college students" (Goodwin, 1995, p. 144), questions regarding the external validity of the research relying on undergraduate participants remain.

The previous investigations of the contents of psychological journals varied in focus. Some analyzed particular journals (e.g., West, Newsom, & Fenaughty, 1992), whereas others analyzed specific topics across multiple journals (e.g., Wiesenthal, Edwards, Endler, Koza, Walton, & Emmott, 1978). Interestingly, the majority of journal investigations focused specifically on the subdisciplines of personality or social psychology (cf. Endler & Speer, 1998; Higbee & Wells, 1972; Reis & Stiller, 1992; Schultz, 1969; Sears, 1986; Smart, 1966). Though these investigations recorded the use of undergraduate research participants, the articles embraced separate agendas, varied in the journals examined, and covered different time intervals. Collectively, they do not provide an over-view of whom psychologists are studying across psychology's multiple subdisciplines.

Undergraduates: Neither Adolescents nor Adults?

Depending upon the number of years of secondary school education in a given geographical area, the average first-year university student is between 17 and 19 years of age. Thus, a disproportionate percentage of the undergraduate population are adolescents. According to Statistics Canada's 1996 Census, only 6.76% of the 1996 Canadian population were between the ages of 15 and 19.1 Similarly, according to the 1993 U.S. Census Bureau, 5.43% of the u.s. resident population were between the ages of 14 and 17, and 9.95% were between the ages of 18 and 24. 2 Consequently, although data are not available for the specific age group of 17 to 19 year olds, they represent a very small minority of the population in both Canada and the U.S.

Moreover, going to university or college is not a universal phenomenon in the transition to adulthood. From the disproportionate percentage of the general population between the ages of 17 and 19, North American university students are carefully selected. Typically, university students are more representative of the upper socio-economic class (Schultz, 1969), and enjoy unusually adept cognitive skills, display superior reading ability, math and verbal skills, and have been selected for compliance to authority (Sears, 1986). Therefore undergraduate students are not representative members of their own age group.