One of the most important decisions that any researcher makes is how to obtain the type of participants needed for the study. Most of you will be doing research on college campuses. In our discussion, we will give examples of each of the strategies that apply directly to campus settings.

Why Is This Important?
Who is in our study and how we sample them are critical aspects of psychological research. The sample that we draw for our study determines the generalizability of our findings. If we obtain a small sample of rare individuals, then our finding cannot apply to a broader population. We want to draw as unbiased a sample as we can from the population of interest.