GENERALIZING RESULTS

Participants typically not selected from the general population, and their samples may affect external validity College Students

Young, with social and political attitudes in flux Well-developed cognitive skills More homogeneous than the general population

Volunteers Gender Considerations Locale

Until recently experiments conducted with college students in the U.S. were primarily white, which reflected college student population at the time

Today most samples of college students are ethnically diverse, matching the more modern diverse population in college

Important to be aware of the ways in which the operational definitions of the constructs that we study are grounded in a particular cultural meaning

The experimenter’s influence on participants needs to be constant throughout the experiment Personality Experience

A solution is to use practice the procedure before interacting with participants

Exact Replications An attempt to replicate precisely the procedures of

a study Ascertain whether the same results are obtained

with replication Conceptual Replications

The use of different procedures to replicate a research finding

The IV from previous study is manipulated in different ways

Literature Review Provides Information that: Summarizes what has been found Tells the reader:

What findings are strongly supported What findings are weakly supported

Exposes inconsistent findings and areas lacking proper research

Discusses future directions for research

Meta-analysis: method for determining the reliability of a finding by examining the results from many different studies

Researcher combines actual results