In: Psychology
Consider the possibility that a faculty member wanted to survey our Research Methods class on the legalization of marijuana as being representative of the college student population. I want you to identify possible representative problems such as the class being criminal justice students and their opinions possibly being different than the college population as a whole. Additionally, the faculty member wants to survey random college students as being representative of the community at large in regards to raising the legal drinking age to 25. What biases or representative problems would exist?
The possible representative problems that can exist in the former instance would be that students exposed to the criminal justice sphere of life know and have dealt with cases in theory that allude to crimes that involve influence of substance that has had repercussions, this can lead to a negative bias towards all forms of substances in general and can lead to hasty generalizations regarding crime rate increasing with the legalisation of Marijuana. Hence, leading to a possible consensus of being against legalisation of the product.
IN the latter case, considering the average normal college students are taken, there is a possibility to have a joint consensus on not increasing the legal age to 25 as this puts hurdles and further debars college students from indulging in alcohol, this is a wrong representative group a this group would be directly affected by the following decision taken which would vitiate their response. The group for consensus needs to be more wide and encompassing of several age groups.