Generalizing to Other Subject Populations?

¶ … generalizing to other subject populations? What are some of the subject population generalization problems that a researcher might confront?

A researcher should be concerned about generalizing to other subject populations because their results will not necessarily be representative of the general population. For example, participants are very rarely selected at random from a broad segment of the population. Most participants are usually freshmen and sophomore college students. This segment of the population is not representative of society as a whole. Secondly, college students gravitate towards experiments in which they have a personal interest, so different kinds of people may be attracted to different types of studies. Studies may also be gender-biased or one gender might outweigh another in a particular study. Again, this is not generalizable to the population. People who live in one area of the country may have different attitudes and outlooks than people in another region. For these reasons, it is difficult to generalize findings to other subject populations (Cozby, 2009, p. 269-270).

2. What is the source of the problem of generalizing to other experimenters? How can this problem be solved?

Sometimes the results of an experiment can be generalized only to certain types of experimenters. Personality, gender and the amount of experience a researcher possesses can all influence the results of an experiment. Participants respond differently to different kinds of people. One solution is to use two or more experimenters, ideally one male and one female, to conduct the research (Cozby, 2009, p. 274).

3. Why is it important to pretest a problem for generalization? Discuss the reasons why including a pretest may affect the ability to generalize results.

Pretesting a problem for generalization is helpful because the researcher can check to see if the groups are equivalent. Researchers can also assess mortality effects and determine if the people who withdrew are different from those individuals who finished the study. Pretesting may affect the ability to generalize results because the results can not be generalized to people who were not given a pretest, and pretests are rarely conducted in day-to-day living (Cozby, 274).

4. Distinguish between an exact replication and a conceptual replication. What is the value of a conceptual replication?

An exact replication is a researcher's attempt to exactly duplicate a study's procedures to determine if similar findings can be obtained. A conceptual representation tries to replicate the findings of a research study by manipulating the variables in a different way. A conceptual replication is valuable because the researcher can determine whether or not the results of the study are generalizable by manipulating or measuring the variables differently than they were used in the first study (Cozby, 2009, 277).