Who is in the sample? An analysis of real and surrogate users as participants in user study research in the information technology fields.

Background: Constructing a sample of as participants in user studies is considered by most researchers to be vital for the validity, usefulness, and applicability of research findings. However, how often user studies reported in information technology academic literature sample or is unknown. Therefore, it is uncertain whether or not the use of in place of is a widespread problem within user study practice.

Objective: To determine how often user studies reported in peer-reviewed information technology literature sample or as participants.

Method: We analyzed 725 user studies reported in 628 peer-reviewed articles published from 2013 through 2021 in 233 unique conference and journal outlets, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science archives. To study the sample selection choices, we categorized each study as generic (., users are from the general population) or targeted (., users are from a specific subpopulation), and the sampled study participants as (., from the study population) or (., other than ).

Results: Our analysis of all 725 user studies shows that roughly two-thirds (75.4%) sampled . However, of the targeted studies, only around half (58.4%) sampled . Of the targeted studies sampling , the majority (69.7%) used students, around one-in-four (23.6%) sampled through crowdsourcing, and the remaining 6.7% of studies used researchers or did not specify who the participants were.

Conclusions: Key findings are as follows: (a) the state of sampling in information technology research has substantial room for improvement for targeted studies; (b) researchers often do not explicitly characterize their study participants in adequate detail, which is probably the most disconcerting finding; and (c) suggestions are provided for recruiting real users, which may be challenging for researchers.

Implications: The results imply a need for standard guidelines for reporting the types of users sampled for a user study. We provide a template for reporting user study sampling with examples.