Convenience samples of college students and research reproducibility

a r t i c l e i n f o Tests of theory in marketing and consumer behavior research are frequently based on convenience samples of undergraduate college students. In a study of business-related ethicality, analysis of data from four dozen convenience samples of undergraduate business students revealed significant differences in means, variances, intercorrelations, and path parameters across the samples. Depending on the particular convenience sample used, relationships between variables and constructs were positive or negative and statistically significant or insignificant. The present research empirically documents, for the first time, the uncertainty created by using convenience samples of college students as research subjects. Only through empirical replications can researchers pragmatically assess the reliability, validity, and generalizability of research findings. I challenge using students—and particularly students from a single department or school—as a sample population from which to generalize about consumer behavior, or even just for testing theory. This is not to say that findings based on students are always wrong. It is only to say that findings based on students are always suspect. Our findings would be substantially more credible if students were not so often the first and only choice. One of the most contentious issues in consumer behavior research, and social science research generally, is the use of convenience samples of undergraduate college students as subjects in behavioral investigations. College students increasingly seem to be the subjects of choice in social psychology and consumer behavior research. To illustrate, Peterson (2001) reports that college students constituted 86% of the re-college students. Arguments for and against the use of college students as research subjects have tended to focus on whether results obtained from such subjects are generalizable to non-student populations. Researchers such as Kardes (1996) and Lucas (2003) have argued that college students are appropriate research subjects when the research emphasis is on basic psychological processes or the theory tested links to human behaviors independent of sample characteristics. According to Berkowitz and Donnerstein (1982, p. 249), the " meaning the subjects assign to the situation they are in and the behavior they are carrying out plays a greater part in determining the generalizability of an experiment's outcome than does the sample's demographic representativeness. " However, other researchers, such as Sears (1986) and Wintre, North, and Sugar (2001), have expressed unease about the use of a narrow database of college students in behavioral research. In particular, Sears suggests that what …