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Another important question is always, 'if this effect is true does this generalize to the overall population'. While I haven't read the paper, I bet that the te
by icegreentea 14y ago
Another important question is always, 'if this effect is true does this generalize to the overall population'. While I haven't read the paper, I bet that the test population were composed almost completely of undergrad students. So much of social science experiments are based on testing done on student. And there isn't anything wrong with that per se, but we must always be careful when trying to infer results, and drawing conclusions on the greater population, or human kind as a whole.
- carbocation 14y agoExternal validity is an interesting but quite different question. There are any number of other interesting but distinct features of clinical trials that we could talk about.
- tedks 14y agoFor some things (socialization, substance use patterns, etc.), you'd expect different results on college students than on other populations, so you'd need to run additional experiments to determine if being a college undergrad moderates whatever effect you study. For other things, like perception, drug effects, etc., it seems less likely that this is actually a problem, because there's no reason to believe the neural pathways that acetaminophen operates over are different between any two humans.