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The article presents a reply to comments about the article "'The Science of the Sophomore' Revisited: From Conjecture to Empiricism," by the authors M. E. Gordon, L.A. Slade, and N. Schmitt, regarding using college students as subjects for organizational research. The authors begin the article by expanding their definition of external validity and the nature of empirical evidence of generalizability. The authors state that their research was not premised on the idea that the use of non-student samples guarantees generalizability, and that their experiments with external validity were confined to within-study comparisons between experimental subject types.

The controversy over using college students as subjects in applied research has been a topic of philosophical discourse and empirical investigation. Thirty-two studies are reviewed in which students and nonstudents participated as subjects under identical conditions. In studies reporting statistical tests of between-group differences, the preponderance of findings indicated that the experimental results differed in the two samples. By contrast, no major differences associated with the type of subject were reported in the majority of studies which did not employ statistical procedures to compare the findings in the two samples. Explanations for differences in the sample are offered, and serve as a basis for recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]