This article offered a lot of insight on the validity of studies and how much bias truly affects most of them. Being a psychology minor, we are required to participate in 6 credits worth of studies conducted by faculty. They then form a conclusion based on the results. However, the valid point the article made was how can you make a conclusion based on a certain population. If I am being honest, I fly through those surveys, as most probably do. We do not do them because we are interested, we do them because they are required. The results that the faculty member receives from a bunch of undergraduate students in an introductory psychology class are most likely far from what the conclusions would be from the general population. The fact that most studies cannot reproduce the same results, shows that the results were inaccurate in the first place.
In my paradigm shift research, I have to ensure that if I obtain studies, they are taken from a population and not simply conducted by grad students with results from hungover college students. These results would cause conclusions that may not particularly be true or actually conclude anything. If I include studies, I must check the person who conducted the study, as well as analyze who the participants were and if the conclusion was made accurately. The problem with including studies, as mentioned by the article, is that the results most likely won’t pertain to you, because of the population they were taken from. I also have to ensure that any research I collect, such as statistics, are from credible sites that obtain their results from an unbiased group.
Finding a study that uses a random sampling of the population is ideal. As you stated, data gets skewed when the results are inaccurate purely based on the lack of motivation to answer the survey. Also, sticking to the data and making your own generalization based purely off data is the best way to create a viewpoint rather than reading someone else have an opinion on a certain data set because of biases.
Hopefully, the required surveys you have to do are for studies specifically done on undergraduate students. If these studies are meant to represent the entire population, then they are going to be incredibly biased. Also, I think it is a good thing that not all people being surveyed are interested in the topic. If people only take surveys they are interested in, then the results will also be biased, as not all people in the population are as interested.