Summary: Researchers found people with personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, and those with depression and anxiety are more likely to participate in psychological research studies. Due to this, the findings of studies may be unduly influenced and may be difficult to be replicated.
Source: The Conversation
Many psychological studies rely on participants to give up their time to take part in experiments or complete questionnaires. They take part because they get paid or because they are required to as part of their university course. But, beyond this, not much is known about what motivates people to take part in these studies.
Some participants may be looking for help – perhaps seeking a diagnosis for a mental health issue they’re struggling with.
A team of researchers in Poland theorized that taking part in a psychological study might be “perceived as a cheap substitute or alternative to acquiring some professional help”.
To this end, they set out to discover if participants in psychological studies were more likely to have a personality disorder or be experiencing depression or anxiety.
Their results are published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
“Researchers often take for granted that the way they advertise their studies and who they recruit do not appreciably affect their outcomes,” the study authors write. “In our studies, we have shown that those who have more personality pathologies are more drawn to studies where they can express their trauma and may be simply more likely to volunteer for studies.”
Izabela Kaźmierczak and colleagues at Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, Poland, conducted several studies, involving 947 participants in total (62% of whom were women), comparing people who had previously taken part in psychology studies with those who had never taken part in such studies.
They found that participants who had previously taken part in studies exhibited symptoms found in those with personality disorders, depression or anxiety. There are many different types of personality disorder – including borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder – but, in short, a person with a personality disorder thinks, feels, behaves or relates to others differently from those without it. They may, for instance, blame people for things, or behave aggressively and unpredictably.
Why it matters
What this new study has revealed is a potentially worrying issue of self-selection. Since participants in research choose which studies to take part in, the results of the research may be unduly influenced by a large number of participants of a particular type taking part. Study bias is a serious issue.
Like many other scientific disciplines, psychology research is designed and carried out mainly in universities. Unlike many disciplines, though, psychology requires human participation and, as such, students form a handy subject pool from which to draw.
This has led many in the field to wonder how research carried out on predominantly 18 to 22-year-old western students can provide findings that are in any way relevant to any population other than 18 to 24-year-old western students.
Research needs to be valid, and if we cannot claim that our findings relate to the wider population (so-called “generalisability”) we have a serious issue. What this new study shows is that our findings may well be influenced by the psychological nature of the very people we are testing.
We cannot, however, control the students who give their time to sit through our procedures. For instance, we cannot provide instructions on recruitment posters that say: “Those with symptoms of personality disorders need not apply.” But we can and must be more careful in how we select our participants.
What we need to do is carry out research with large enough numbers of people, work that can be repeated, that can allow us to be more confident that our findings have relevance off campus.
Bumpy road
All sciences have their bumpy roads to travel, and psychology has certainly been travelling on one in recent years. Experiments that were once deemed to be groundbreaking, have failed to produce the same results when they were repeated by other psychologists. This is known as the “replication crisis” or “reproducibility crisis”.
And the shockwaves caused by the scientific treason of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch psychologist who invented his data and even fabricated entire experiments, are still being felt. Psychology’s reputation has certainly taken a battering.
But psychologists are working carefully on developing transparency and techniques we hope will help us regain the faith of the wider scientific community. What this latest paper has shown is that the participants themselves may well be self-selecting – and, as a result, our findings may again be called into question. We may think we are drawing from as general a population as possible to make the results generalizable to the wider population, but that may not be the case.
This finding will set alarm bells ringing in those working to develop the reliability and reputation of psychology. It needs to be taken seriously.
The results tell us more formally something we should have already known. Those of us involved in psychological research involving participants drawn largely from a pool of psychology students need to be very careful in our recruitment strategies.
We might, for instance, need to take care to design research that may not be influenced by the personality or mood of the participant, or we may need to assess the participants taking part in our research. For example, the authors of this latest study suggest winnowing out participants who have taken part in previous psychology studies.
Most importantly, we need to be very careful in the grand claims we make after we publish how our “groundbreaking” research relates to the wider population we look to be investigating. Such a claim may not, it seems, stand up to scrutiny.
About this personality disorder and psychology research news
Author: Nigel Holt
Source: The Conversation
Contact: Nigel Holt – The Conversation
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Self-selection biases in psychological studies: Personality and affective disorders are prevalent among participants” by Izabela Kaźmierczak et al. PLOS ONE
Abstract
Self-selection biases in psychological studies: Personality and affective disorders are prevalent among participants
Respondents select the type of psychological studies that they want to participate in consistence with their needs and individual characteristics, which creates an unintentional self-selection bias.
The question remains whether participants attracted by psychological studies may have more psychological dysfunctions related to personality and affective disorders compared to the general population.
We investigated (N = 947; 62% women) whether the type of the invitation (to talk about recent critical or regular life events) or the source of the data (either face-to-face or online) attracts people with different psychopathology.
Most importantly, participants who alone applied to take part in paid psychological studies had more symptoms of personality disorders than those who had never before applied to take part in psychological studies.
The current results strongly translate into a recommendation for either the modification of recruitment strategies or much greater caution when generalizing results for this methodological reason.
