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The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action

Open access
Nielsen, Mark, Haun, Daniel, Kärtner, Joscha, Legare, Cristine H.·2017·Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
DOI 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.017
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Abstract

Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature toward the study of participants developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world’s population. Here, we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address overreliance on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with diverse populations. We show that high-impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed toward publishing articles with data from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the discipline is making any meaningful movement toward drawing from diverse samples. Failure to confront the possibility that culturally specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public dissemination of study findings.

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Metadata

Authors
Nielsen, M., Haun, D., Kärtner, J., & Legare, C. H.
Venue
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2017-10
Volume
162
Pages
31-38
ISSN
0022-0965 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.017
OpenAlex
W2618478924
Cited by
1,030
References
8
FWCI
96.81
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Funders
Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP140101410)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.017
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Nielsen, M., Haun, D., Kärtner, J., & Legare, C. H. (2017). The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.017

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