Every time I see some moral panic article about how some alarming % of teens admit to vaping or smoking or doing drugs or whatever, I think about that time in 9th grade when school handed us a survey on substance use, told us we had to fill it out, and me and a half dozen friends reported that we’d been habitual users of heroin, cocaine, and acid since the age of 9.
“Mischievous Responder Bias” is a known problem in surveying youth but it’s annoying and expensive to overcome it so often people don’t….also the things that come up when people try to look for it are hilarious, like 99% of the kids who reported having a missing limb were lying.
It is my favorite thing about education research: that you have to remember that your subjects are a bunch of little scamps trying to prank you.
Teens?
Look, I know what happens if you put a poll on tumblr and make Vanilla Extract one of the options.