I wonder whether there is a meta-analysis indicating participant demographic characteristics in psycholinguistic studies. My impression is that we tend to recruit highly educated people such as students and older individuals with university degrees. However, I wonder whether anyone has looked at this in a more systematic manner, possibly revealing other biases for sex, language, etc. Thank you!
Thanks a million, Tahmineh. I found these two papers, but they are not specific to psycholinguistics.
Bodner, T. E. (2006). Designs, participants, and measurement methods in psychological research. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 47(4), 263.
Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., & Podsakoff, N. P. (2012). Sources of method bias in social science research and recommendations on how to control it. Annual review of psychology, 63(1), 539-569.
Dear Adrià, as a quick comment on your interesting observation: There is definitely a "bias" in L2 research towards samples that can easily be reached by the researchers, and those are university students and school pupils. But I wouldn't necessarily consider this a bias for the research findings themselves. The articles will typically state that their findings can only be generalised to a population that has the same characteristics as their samples (=external validity) - so they are not making any false (or biased) claims. Perhaps we should discuss this as an oversight or a lack of data for particular populations.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Mathematics