Students as Experimental Participants
An experiment entails randomly assigning participants to various conditions or manipulations. Given common consent requirements, this means experimenters need to recruit participants who, in essence, agree to be manipulated. The ensuing practical and ethical challenges of subject recruitment have led many researchers to rely on convenience samples of college students. For political scientists who put particular emphasis on generalizability, the use of student participants often constitutes a critical, and according to some reviewers, fatal problem for experimental studies.