Posted on 01/14/2014 11:46:43 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
Ithaca, N.Y. — Were Cornell University gender researchers punked by their teen subjects? That’s one of the conclusions made by the Ivy League school about a landmark study of adolescent sexuality.
The research, done in the 1990s, found five to seven percent of high schoolers professed being homosexual or bisexual. The figure was many times that of previous estimates of about one percent of adolescents. However, follow-up interviews found 70 percent of the adolescents that self-reported being gay or bisexual later described themselves a heterosexual.
“How could it be that 5 to 7 percent of our youth were homosexual or bisexual!” asked Cornell’s Ritch C. Savin-Williams. Savin-Williams, director of the school’s Sex and Gender Lab, recently published (along with Kara Joyner of Bowling Green State University) a review of the controversial findings.
The National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health (known as “Add Health”) created what Cornell calls “a cottage industry for scholars of human sexuality – Savin-Williams among them.” Both Savin-Williams and Joyner aired their possible reasons for such a stark contrast in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
In an essay entitled “The Dubious Assessment of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Adolescents of Add Health,” the two offer the leading theory for the out-of-whack results: pranksters.
“I can take a joke as well as the next academic,” Savin-Williams says. However, the adolescent pranksters gave researchers, clinicians and policymakers the sense that “gay youth are more suicidal, depressed and psychologically ill than are straight youth.”
Aside from being pranked, researchers in the 1990s study were not explicit enough in wording their questions. Rather than asking about “romantic attraction”, later Add Health surveys “actually used the ‘S word’ as in sexual orientation,” according to the university.
“We’re guessing that some research subjects ultimately understood the message, that they said: ‘Now I know what you’re asking – and no, I’m not,’” said Savin-Williams.
The lesson from all this? “We need to be more careful when we do our research that our sexual-minority participants are representative of the gay youth population so that we can accurately and adequately represent their lives,” he said.
You cannot get good data from a group that is generally in a rebellious phase...
This comes out shortly after I’d heard from several sources that “70% of homosexual teenagers become exclusively heterosexual.”
I’m old enough to remember when “gender” was a grammatical term that applied only to nouns.
I always made crap up when given stupid, nosy questionnaires to fill out in school.
I instruct my children to do the same and view it as a creative writing exercise.
In a democrat phone interview I was once a black 65 year old female that had voted for Bush twice and was voting for Romney and not Odumbo — Man was that poor poll taker confused when that call ended. But I had a lot of fun with her.
I wonder how controlled the Masters and Johnson study group was. Were they looking for an easy lay?
Ahhhh...the good old days! When sex was sex and gender was for English class only!
It really shouldn’t take an Ivy League academic to figure out adolescents will have fun with something like this. My High School Freshman must tell me “JK” half a dozen times a day (just kidding).
Okay. Fine. But how well does "the next academic" take a joke?
Not very well. Yes.
The left are such deceitful hypocrites...
They have had a campaign for several years now,
attempting what they call “jamming” -
trying to convince people that homos are ubiquitous
and are at least 10% of the population.
So did I.
So do I.
Under my tutelage, my son is developing quite a bizarre sense of humor.
PING
Knowing that the only people who would do so are working to undermine traditional values, if someone asked me about this kind of stuff even today, I’d lie my butt off just to spite them.
that is fun to do. do it all the time.
One it’s time foe to confess after all these years in the shadows. I’m the infamous Milwaukee Enema Bandit. I’ll leave the disgusting, degrading details to your imaginations.
The girls, on the other hand were more serious in general but I believe even some of them would have done the same.
It’s fun isn’t it? I usually hang up on pollsters but when I don’t, I like to lie to them. I think more people do that than we (or the pollsters) realize.
I suppose we are just a couple of old fuddy duddies, to whom the word, "gay", still means happy too.
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