Sample Adequacy and Implications for Occupational Health Psychology Research

Bergman and Jean (2016) skillfully summarize how the industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology literature generally overrepresents salaried, core, managerial, professional, and executive employees. We concur that that the underrepresentation of traditional workers (i.e., wage earners, laborers, first-line personnel, freelancers, contract workers, and other workers outside managerial, professional, and executive positions) can negatively affect our science. In our commentary we extend the arguments of Bergman and Jean by (a) discussing the appropriate use of samples, which are determined by study goals and hypotheses, and (b) further examining samples in occupational health psychology (OHP) and related journals, which generally require worker samples.