Researchers are ideally interested in making claims about all human beings: research would be much less interesting if it only applied to the participants who joined a study. Generalisation in research is based on a set of (delicate) statistical assumptions. This session will introduce to the most important notions of selection or missingness mechanism in a scientific study and to the different types of selection. Then, the implications of a poor selection mechanism are shown numerically. The aim is to prepare the researcher to distinguish between the different types of selection and to be aware of the hidden statistical obstacles to effective generalisation.

Alberto Arletti’s Biosketch
Department of Economics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Alberto Arletti is post-doctoral research fellow in Social Statistics at the Department of Economics, at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. In April 2025 he completed the PhD programme in Statistical Sciences at the University of Padova, where he also completed Master and Bachelor degrees in Rehabilitation Neuroscience and Personality Psychology respectively. Member of Psicostat since 2016. His research interest is in Social Statistics and research methodology.