Volunteer Bias | Психология взаимоотношений

Earlier in this chapter we touched on the topic of volunteer bias in our discussion of Morton Hunt’s Sexual Behavior in the 1970s. Because Hunt’s sample was such a small percentage of those he contacted, volunteer bias prevents his results from being generaliz — able to the population as a whole.

Imagine that we wanted to administer a questionnaire about college students’ attitudes toward sexuality, and we recruited volunteers from your biology class. Do you think

samples of convenience

A research methodology that involves using samples that are easy to collect and acquire.

those who volunteer would be different from those who do not? Research indicates that they may indeed differ.

As early as 1969, Rosenthal & Rosnow (1975) claimed that those who volunteer for psychological studies often have a special interest in the studies in which they participate. Studies that have examined volunteer bias in sexuality research conducted with college students generally support the finding that volunteers differ from nonvolunteers (Catania et al., 1995; Gaither et al., 2003). Volunteers have been found to be more sexually liberal, more sexually experienced, more interested in sexual variety, and more likely to have had sexual intercourse and to have performed oral sex; and they report less traditional sexual attitudes than nonvolunteers (Bogaert, 1996; Gaither, 2000; Plaud et al., 1999; Wiederman, 1999). Research has also found that overall, men are more likely than women to volunteer for sexuality studies (Gaither et al., 2003).

You might be wondering how a researcher would know whether his or her volunteer sample is different from the nonvolunteer sample. After all, how can the researcher know anything about the nonvolunteers who are not in the study? Researchers have designed ways of overcoming this problem. Prior to asking for volunteers to take part in a sexuality study, researchers ask all participants to fill out a questionnaire that contains personality measures and sexuality questions. Participants are then asked whether or not they would volunteer for a sexuality study. Because the researchers already have information from both volunteers and nonvolunteers, they simply compare these data.

Because volunteers appear to differ from nonvolunteers, it is impossible to generalize the findings of a study that used a volunteer sample. The Kinsey studies attempted to decrease volunteer bias by obtaining full participation from each member of the groups they studied.