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

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.

Keywords: Cross-cultural research; Cultural psychology; Developmental psychology; Developmental science; Diversity; Generalizable data; Representative data; WEIRD data.

Fig. 1.

Percentages of participant representation in all articles published in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Developmental Science in 2008 and 2015.