Experimentation and college students in social psychology research

Abstract. In research published in four social psychology journals at the beginning of the 1970s, experimental research predominated over correlational research, and college students predominated over non-college samples. However, there was considerable variation among the different journals. It was suggested that the use of experimentation on college students does not necessarily make research ungeneralizable or irrelevant. The suggestions of some social psychologists during the 1960s that there were trends in social psychology research away from an emphasis on experimentation (vs. correlational research) and the use of college students as subjects (vs. non-college samples) prompted Higbee and Wells (1972) to investigate the trends in published social psychology research during the 1960s. They categorized the articles published in the 1969 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), then compared their analysis with the results of similar analyses done in 1949 and 195