If we are trying to collect data about a population, we usually want to randomly select participants to control for other factors. However, who decides to respond to such a survey may be biased towards those who have time or feel strongly about it.
How do experimenters in psychology (in particular) get around the fact that many people may not choose to respond or participate and could bias their results?
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It depends on the size of the survey, but there are two common methods:
1. Acknowledge the problem but don’t try to correct it at all; and,
2. Acknowledge the problem, but normalize the numbers based on the data you do have.
“Normalizing” is a complicated process where you adjust the numbers you have so that you can compare them to each other. For example, you might ignore the overall numbers and just compare percentages and say something like “25% of men and 30% of women …”
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