Evaluating the College Sophomore Problem: The Case of Personality and Politics

Abstract

College sophomores feature prominently in social scientific research but are frequently criticized for providing unrepresentative, invalid, and unreliable data. Using the case of personality and politics, the present authors evaluated those critiques, concluding that college sophomores are not representative of the general adult population on all 5 factors of personality. Despite this limitation, analyses show that the relationship between personality and political opinions is virtually identical for college students and a comparison group of adults. Further, a range of reliability statistics suggests that college students provide reliable data on personality. College students are not a panacea for the problems of participant recruiting, but they should not be discounted as unreliable and invalid, either. In many cases, the so-called "college-sophomore problem" is not a problem.