We hope to be able to generalize our research results to people other than those who actually participated in our research. For the typical psychology study, why is it hard to determine the people to whom our research will generalize?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Most psychological research with people involves undergraduate psychology students, the majority of whom are female. So we are likely to be able to generalize to other young, educated women, although it isn't always clear if we can generalize to men or to people younger or older than the female college students. For some measurements, the participants we use may be representative of many other people, but for other measurements (e.g., attitudes), the participants may not be like older or younger people or men, or even female students at other schools or in different parts of the country or in other countries.
The issue is complicated because, for some measurements, our participants produce very similar results to many other groups (e.g., speed of learning one type of material versus another), whereas for other measurements (e.g., attitudes toward abortion), participants in a single location may not be like others.