Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

D I V E R S I T Y
Choosing Participants Who Represent the 
Scope of Human Behavior
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Module 6 
Critical Research Issues 
51
 Neuroscience in Your Life:
The Importance 
of Using Representative Participants
FIGURE 1
Choosing a diverse set of participants is important in research studies, because 
personal characteristics are refl ected in participants’ responses as basic as brain activity. In 
these graphs, we can see that the level of education of a child’s mother infl uences a child’s 
ability to pay attention. In the study, scientists recorded electrical brain activity. Children 
whose mothers had a higher level of education show greater brain activation when they were 
attending to a story than when they were ignoring the story, compared with children whose 
mothers had a lower level of education. 
(Source: Stevens et al., 2009.)
High Maternal Education
Low Maternal Education
Attended
Unattended
Attended
Unattended
psychology is a science whose goal is to explain human behavior generally, its 
studies must use participants who are fully representative of the general population 
in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and educational level 
(see also Figure 1). To encourage a wider range of participants, the National Institute 
of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation—the primary U.S. funding 
sources for psychological research—now require that experiments address issues of 
diverse populations (Carpenter, 2002; Lindley, 2006).
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