If you collect data from university student your findings reflect the perception of university students. Sample--->Space. Universal generalization of these findings is considered scientifically solid. But you don'y have to genralize it at all. Why not?

Ufkuk Turen! I agree with you. If the data is collected in the context of university student's perception. There will be no problem at all

Fist of all, thanks for all the answers.

Mumtaz. The aim is to link the places (neighbourhoods) in which foreingners live with the perception that the spanish population has about it. I would use a enquire with maps, and the students would have to mark the places where they think foreigners live, and answer some questions related. After, I would compare the results with reality (as taken from census). As running an enquire considering the whole population is difficult (even taking a sample), I was wondering if asking students would do.

interesting idea, Juan José Natera Rivas

it's an interesting idea. You need to handle the biases. Which would be little heavy task.

As others have said - interesting idea. You'll need to know where the students are from as I imagine they won't all be local (then again, I guess that would be the same for the general population). How will you organise your questions - questionnaire, semi-structured interview, other?

It will be very useful information and bias can be minimized with large number of database. It will be worth of try to get the data from the students.

Hello, thanks again for the answers.

The biass is a question I must think about, I really didn´t realize before, so thanks.

David, yes, I am taking into account if the students are local, are only spending in Málaga the time of the semesters, or if they live outside and comes to the University on a daily basis. I think that side is covered, as I will use only the first group of students. And I will organise the questions using a questionaire, given to all the students, wich contains a question to differentiate among the three groups.

In a couple of weeks I will begin with a batch of questionaires to test the process, hope I proves usefull.

If I understand you correctly based on your proposed plan, the idea is to determine if a group of residents perceives the location of immigrants in the actual place they live and to get information on their (the Spanish population of Malaga) perception of "places" that immigrants live. I assume the ultimate objective is to better understand the biases vs realities of the population related to immigrants (or something similar to this).

The question you have asked is whether this can be done with college students. I am sorry, but, if I have understood correctly, the answer is no. College students are a completely non-presentative population. They generally are more highly educated (education is a strong potential bias for studies about immigrants), younger (again a strong bias for studies about immigrants), and much more technology savvy (a potential bias if the read information on Facebook, Twitter, or other Social Media sites) than the general population. If you want to target that population, they are a key group, but not representation of the larger population.

No Juan, I agree with Edgar Chambers, you cannot use students as they're not necessarily immigrants. But you can gather data from different representative groups of which one group could be students. But then you will have to specify in the student group, whether the participant is a native of the area, a temporary resident (for purposes of study only), mature postgraduate student who have taken on permanent residence, or other. So, if you use students, you will probably also have to categorise them according to different characteristics, not an easy task.

I have to agree with Ufuk Turen and Edgar Chambers that university students are not a representative sample and so data will not be generalizable.

Moreover, there can be a perception that working at a university it is somehow "easier" to get access to participants by collecting data from students; I'm not sure this is truly so though. (This approach to data collection was commonplace in undergraduate psychology in the early 1990s when I studied.)

You will need to complete an ethics application regardless should you plan to conduct a study and publish from it. You will need to consider consent issues.

Ethics committees may well, in fact, have more concerns about protecting the right to decline to participate and to withdraw with students, due to the unequal power relationship when you are teaching them.

Is your study at all related to a course they are enrolled in with you?

This may create a situation where students are more motivated to participate, however your framing of the course and content delivered too could be an introduced bias into how they perceive immigrants (and how they perceive you might like them to perceive immigrants...)...

A lot to think about :)

THis is the procedure many professional survey institutes actually do, particularly for some ad hoc one off surveys. Different approach needed for a longitudinal survey as students are highly mobile

Unfortunately a lot of research tends to be conducted within opportunity samples (i.e., university students). Even though it is not always ideal, you can still gain insight into your research question through this population - you will just have to make sure you consider what limitations/biases this will bring and keep these in mind when interpreting your findings.

There is an extensive literature reporting the inadequacies of University Student samples if one wishes to generalize to populations other than University Students. One particularly good study is: Peterson, Robert, A. "On the use o college students in social science research: Insights from a second order meta-analysis. Journal of consumer Research, 28, (Dec), 450 -461,