Student Surrogation in Behavioural Business Research: A Review and Decision Process Model

The use of students as subjects in academic research is widespread. A systematic review of research‐oriented journals ranging from the behavioural sciences to pure sciences shows that a great deal of research involves student subjects. In business and management oriented research these students tend to be largely male and undergraduate. As three eminent marketing academics remarked somewhat cynically some years ago, “What we know about consumer behaviour may be too closely tied to the sociopsychological and behavioural profile of the college sophomore” (Cunningham, Anderson and Murphy, 1974). Marketing has been an area particularly prone to student‐based research, with an audit of the first 30 issues of the Journal of Marketing Research revealing that over half of the consumer behaviour experiments (48 of 81) used students as subjects (Enis, Cox and Stafford, 1972). Casual perusal of a wide variety of present day journals in other areas, such as accounting and finance, management information systems, work study, and human resources management points to the increase of this practice. This paper reviews briefly the extensive literature on the question of student surrogacy and presents a bibliographic summary of studies accepting the use of, and those rejecting, student surrogation. It also offers a decision model for consideration by researchers contemplating using students in their endeavours.