Who participates in PTSD treatment research?

PTSD treatment studies may include people of all different backgrounds. Some studies look specifically at a certain type of people, such as a specific age group, sex, or racial or ethnic group. Other studies try to recruit participants of diverse backgrounds. We can learn different things from PTSD treatment studies that have a specific or broad sample (group of participants), so both types of studies are valuable. Learning who participates in research tells us how "generalizable" the results are. That is, we want to know whether the findings from given studies (or samples) apply to the rest of the population, or to ourselves if we are considering treatment.