Publishing articles that used college students as participants?

[Biopsychosocialmodel]

How publishable are studies on depression and anxiety that used college students as participants? I am making decisions regarding clinical psychology programs and one program I am very interested in is situated in a small town and college students may be the primary source of participants for research. Just wondering if I can get some advice on how serious this issue is for research and publication opportunities.

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[BizQuick]

Your data will likely be skewed towards less severe depression than you would like for purposes of regression / modeling; at least, that was my experience looking at depression symptoms as part of my master's thesis with a college student sample. I don't think it will stop you from publishing, provided you design the study well and keep sampling issues in mind.

I'm sure someone will come into this thread with, "But my college pop is very depressed!!!" Sure, fine; I'm saying that on average, college student populations will be less depressed that populations you could recruit from in other settings.

 

[Justanothergrad]

How publishable are studies on depression and anxiety that used college students as participants? I am making decisions regarding clinical psychology programs and one program I am very interested in is situated in a small town and college students may be the primary source of participants for research. Just wondering if I can get some advice on how serious this issue is for research and publication opportunities.

Most research that is published uses undergraduates. It's just a bias our research has and so, no- it wont be a problem to publish that assuming the methods, research questions, writing, etc. are good and pose a novel contribution. I was discussing this with a big name journal editor at APA last year. He preferred undergraduates over online recruitment (Mturk, etc.) because he felt undergraduates were less biased by previous experience of repeated testing you might see from folks who utilize those methods as primary/major sources of income.

I think the issue with clinical populations drawn from student samples is that, as he said, you get skewed report without a clinical diagnosis. Some samples will have less symptom report elevations while others will have more. It just leaves you needing to do clinical interviews (like the SCID) to get a good sample of clinically elevated folks, and that can be a pain. I've known plenty of folks to go that route- it just takes time.

 

[MCParent]

How publishable are studies on depression and anxiety that used college students as participants? I am making decisions regarding clinical psychology programs and one program I am very interested in is situated in a small town and college students may be the primary source of participants for research. Just wondering if I can get some advice on how serious this issue is for research and publication opportunities.

How does the POI you want to work with get her/his non-UG participants?

Learn secondary data analysis. Most large data sets have depression and anxiety variables in them. My productivity has jumped up since I learned to do that stuff.

 

[Ollie123]

How publishable are studies on depression and anxiety that used college students as participants? I am making decisions regarding clinical psychology programs and one program I am very interested in is situated in a small town and college students may be the primary source of participants for research. Just wondering if I can get some advice on how serious this issue is for research and publication opportunities.

Too broad to answer with any degree of certainty? It depends on the specifics of the research and what the standards are for good research. Certainly, many journals publish studies comprised predominantly of undergrads. Sometimes this is easier to justify - if the "emerging adult" population is specifically of interest, if examining very basic processes that are unlikely to differ as a function of age/generation/etc. it isn't likely to be a huge deal. If your interests are in more severe symptoms or large-scale clinical trials, that is likely to pose a problem.

I think the answer is just to look at how frequently your potential mentor is publishing and where they are publishing. If they are getting stuff out (from recently collected data) in journals you would be happy to publish in, its probably not a big issue.