THE WEAKNESSES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: That Gay Steroid Story.

I don’t buy this study which found that gay and bisexual boys use steroids at much higher rates than straight boys . . .

A researcher at Cornell recently asserted that National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health may have been tainted by ‘jokesters’. The Longitudinal Study showed a high rate of adolescents switching their answers from “gay/bisexual” to straight over the course of the study, and the Cornell researcher hypothesized that those inconsistent answers were coming from kids who weren’t taking the study seriously. And, the adolescents who took the study less seriously also happened to be troubled in other ways, thus making gay and bisexual students seem more disturbed than they might actually be . . .

Assuming that these two studies share similar designs – and similar design flaws – it’s possible that the latest steroid study was influenced by teens who don’t take these types of things seriously.

Earlier: Do ‘jokesters’ distort research on gay youth?