Decide if a research finding generalizes beyond who you actually talked to
A real, honest finding about the five people you interviewed isn't automatically a finding about everyone else.
- Use it for
- Anyone with a research finding who wants to check honestly how far it actually generalizes.
A finding from a set of interviews or a study is genuinely true about who was actually talked to, but that doesn't mean it's true of the broader population it's often quietly assumed to represent — who got recruited, who agreed to participate, and who's easiest to reach all shape a sample in ways that limit how far a finding actually generalizes. This prompt checks that explicitly before the finding gets applied broadly.
When not to use this
If the research method already accounted for representative sampling (a proper random sample of the target population), this check is less urgent — it matters most for the common case of a convenience or recruited sample.
Did this work?
You know specifically who this finding does and doesn't plausibly generalize to, based on who was actually studied, not an assumption that it applies broadly.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.