“‘Mischievous Responders’ Confound Research On Teens”, 2014-05-22 (; backlinks; similar):
Teenagers face some serious issues: drugs, bullying, sexual violence, depression, gangs. They don’t always like to talk about these things with adults. One way that researchers and educators can get around that is to give teens a survey—a simple, anonymous questionnaire they can fill out by themselves without any grown-ups hovering over them. Hundreds of thousands of students take such surveys every year. School districts use them to gather data; so do the federal government, states and independent researchers.
But a new research paper points out one huge potential flaw in all this research: kids who skew the results by making stuff up for a giggle. “Mischievous Responders”, they’re called.
They may say they’re 7 feet tall, or weigh 400 pounds, or have three children. They may exaggerate their sexual experiences, or lie about their supposed criminal activities…For example, 41% of the students who claimed they were transgender also claimed to be extremely tall or short, and the same percentage also claimed they were in a gang…In other words, kids will be kids, especially when you ask them about sensitive issues.
Jackson Terry, 14, says he answered honestly when he took one of these surveys last year, but he knows kids who didn’t. “They handed out the sheet, I believe it was in language class”, says Terry, who’s from Granville, Ohio. “The teacher was in the room. It was anonymous. I think they asked us about bullying, do you feel safe in school, some questions about drugs, the learning environment.” Some kids “would joke through the entire thing and have a cocky attitude about it”, Terry says. “Afterwards some would say, yeah, No. 5, that’s totally not true; I just made something up.”
…This is important because researchers are often the most interested in minority groups, and so the undetected presence of a small number of jokesters can seriously mess up results. In a 2003 study, 19% of teens who claimed to be adopted actually weren’t, according to follow-up interviews with their parents. When you excluded these kids (who also gave extreme responses on other items), the study no longer found a statistically-significant difference between adopted children and those who weren’t on behaviors like drug use, drinking and skipping school. The paper had to be retracted. In yet another survey, fully 99% of 253 students who claimed to use an artificial limb were just kidding.
“Part of you laughs about it, and the researcher side is terrified”, says Robinson-Cimpian. “We have to do something about this. We can’t base research and policy and beliefs about these kids on faulty data.”
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