Quote:
Originally Posted by 13ball
Are you saying that 19 year old female college students are more likely to be racist than the average population? Because that is one of the stupidest arguments I have heard in a while. If anything, the samples in these studies are going to under report racial prejudice.
This was the gotcha you came up with?
To sum it up again for you:
I think it´s ridiculous to make claims about the prevalence of racial prejudice in a whole country when working with a samplesize that consists of basically exclusively white, young, females in a university.
Have you any idea how skewed some of these experiments are if you reward the participants with course credits? This leads to situations where people have to partake in something like this in order to finish a course requirement.
I´ll try to explain it to you in a hypothetical scenario, because maybe then you will see it more clearly due to not being attached to defending a ****ty study you posted.
Imagine you conduct a study into a random topic and in order to recruit participants you reward participants with 10 bucks. You end up with 55 participants, who are mostly male.
Now how representative is your study for the population of your country?
Probably not very representative, because your incentive (=10 bucks) leads to a selection bias. You will have literally no successfull business man, because nearly none of them is gonna participate due to lack of time and missing incentives. On the other hand, you will have many unemployed, broke people, who could use the 10 bucks and also have the time to participate.
Have I made my point clear enough?
This is a big problem in general in research, that the incentive to participate often leads to a selection bias.
Not to mention, that rating pictures on a self developed "Innocence Scale" and proclaiming that this is a valid operationalisation of racial prejudice is a bit presumptuous