On the merits of student-recruited sampling: Opinions a decade in the making

Student-recruited sampling (SRS), which typically involves students soliciting participants from predetermined populations to assist in data collection, has become an increasingly common and important research design feature. As evidence, many of the top occupational science journals have published studies with SRS as an important research component in recent years. Supportive evidence notwithstanding, SRS has been subjected to considerable consternation – Arguments that often have taken a one-sided, and highly pejorative, tone. Wheeler, Shanine, Leon, and Whitman's (2013, J. Occup. Organ. Psychol.) recent meta-analysis, which compared data from SRS and non-SRS contexts, challenged the legitimacy of these claims. Findings opposed the persistent ‘non-representativeness’ criticism documenting comparable effect sizes for politics perceptions and engagement across designs. In this commentary, I briefly discuss implications of their findings and then offer my opinions regarding the use of SRS as informed by the last decade of personal involvement.