Does boys' mischief surpass girls'?

[koganbot]

Reposting this from Tumblr, where Tom Ewing links a piece at NPR by Amy Kamenetz. Here are Tom's comments (though I'm not sure whom he's quoting at the start) and underneath them my own speculation:

If kids report that they’re transgender and have one leg and belong to a gang and have several children … take it with a grain of salt.

This is a good article on, basically, kids trolling surveys for a laugh. It happens a lot. If I was a kid in the age of online surveys, I’d do it too. Especially if it was one of those surveys where the sole purpose is a hand-wringing clickbait headline about how kids these days think the Earth is flat or would marry their iPhone or whatever. If you’re offered a ludicrous answer in a survey designed to confirm someone’s view of how crappy the modern world is or how dumb everybody is - well, it’s hardly surprising some people take the hint.

But as one look at the article summary tells you, this is also a real problem. What the industry euphemistically calls “hard-to-reach” populations - small minority populations, basically - are actually harmed by this kind of stuff. The article has a good example - a study that reported negative impacts of adoption turned out to show nothing of the sort when troll answers got taken out.

I am not part of any population that suffers from prejudice or bias - name a privilege and I benefit from it. But I am a researcher, so I see at reasonably close hand what happens to data. And it seems to me that data and representation have a treacherous relationship. Inevitably, since people find in data what they are looking for.

On the one hand, data can offer stark evidence of inequalities, different needs and priorities, and different experiences: numbers that can be vital in making a case for change. On the other, data can be the comfort blanket that tells decision makers that change isn’t important. Research can erase minorities by reducing them to the status of a statistical insignificance, or it can ignore the diversity of their experiences in favour of a data-enforced average. There is every reason for people to mistrust data and research.

And cases like the adoption study one introduce yet another such reason - the possibility that careless research will end up magnifying the voices of the mischievous (or, let’s face it, malicious) and endorse stigmatizing myths instead of revealing anything useful. The remedies outlined - dummy questions in particular - are ingenious, and this kind of internal check should be routine in any important survey. But the uneasy relationship between research and representation - at the analysis stage as well as the collection stage - is harder to solve.

Article doesn't mention gender, but I would wager that most mischievous responders are male. I'd also bet - not quite as confidently - that because the surveys were done in a classroom, and despite their being anonymous, they got a higher rate of mischief than if the responders hadn't been in the same room together in a teen-specific setting.

I'm relying on my imperfect memory here, but I recall an article in Billboard in the '80s that stated that teen girls had an outsize effect on what was played on Top 40 radio because researchers simply didn't trust what teen boys would tell them and therefore discounted what the boys said or wouldn't even survey boys - if I remember right, the article didn't cite boys' tendency towards mischief but rather said that boys were hostile and defensive (and I assume underlying this, frightened; and I assume the mischief is somewhat fear-based itself). Whereas you could trust a girl's response much more, that she listened to what she said she did, that she bought the advertised products she said she did. (But from reading your posts over the years I wouldn't be surprised if you were to tell me that the reliability of girls' responses is only relatively better, that there are all sorts of reasons that even sincere responses can't be trusted, ranging from the respondents' not understanding the question to their not knowing their own mind, etc.)

Comments

Boys, Girls, re Mischief

[(Anonymous)]

"Whereas you could trust a girl's response much more, that she listened to what she said she did, that she bought the advertised products she said she did." How did they know the boys were lying? Judging by "hostile, defensive" manner?

"(But from reading your posts over the years I wouldn't be surprised if you were to tell me that the reliability of girls' responses is only relatively better, that there are all sorts of reasons that even sincere responses can't be trusted..." Including wistful thinking, perhaps? What you'd *love* to buy... don allred

Re: Boys, Girls, re Mischief

[koganbot]

Don, I don't know on what basis researchers decided that boys were less likely to tell the truth, if the evidence was anecdotal or systematic or what. I assume it was way more than just a hostile defensive manner, but that doesn't mean researchers were able to conduct controlled, definitive experiments. Maybe there are ways to follow up the behavior of people who participate in focus groups. Tom Ewing would be the one to ask.

But market researchers have been wrestling with such questions for years. After all, if their results don't predict anything about consumer behavior, market research doesn't have a product to sell.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(consider this the levite passing by on the other side)

(for testing purposes: obvs i have an LJ account so maybe slip past the cyberguardians anyway)

[koganbot]

In fact, the notifications are indeed working now. Thank you.

from Bob Le Flaneur re Mischief and Boys

[(Anonymous)]

Well Barack Obama arrived in Brussels today, and just one hour ago I had lunch with him.

He said to me, "Bob, tell me, what should I do about Putin?"

I said to him, "Listen, the only thing that this Putin guy is really afraid of is HOMOSEXUALS. Therefore, you should send THOUSANDS OF HOMOSEXUALS to the Crimea. And remember to give them plenty of suntan oil -- this time of year you'll NEVER get them off those beaches!"

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Found a pretty good academic overview of "mischievous" survey responders (the study calls them "jokesters") but AFAICT no discussion of gender. They point to several banner discussions of jokesters that may reference gender, though I'll bet those studies (about adoption, citizenship, and disability) don't have much to say about why any gender disparities operate the way they do, as these seem to be artifacts of surveying rather than the point of the studies. The big idea, as far as I read anyway, is merely that very large studies of uncontroversial questions don't lead to much mischief, but for very specific populations AND very unique questions, there's a good chance that trolling messes with results.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Fwded to your email. (And let me know if you get a notification for the comments.)

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, notification came through, as obviously did your post itself. Oddly enough, your email hasn't. And I'm posting this without logging in to see if this makes it too. (Note to lurkers; there's been some spottiness as to whether or not I get email notifications from lj, the problem being not with lj, as far as I can tell, but with my ISP. So I've been asking friends to post comments, both under their lj moniker or anonymously. Lurkers are encouraged to do so too. This is all really a back-handed attempt to move koganbot into lj's top 6,000 blogs.)

My memory of the Billboard piece is that mischief wasn't mentioned; the problem was a combination of boys being afraid or unwilling to tell the truth and their not knowing their truth. I don't recall the article going into much detail. I'd speculate that it's more natural for boys to feel they need to put on a show, to impress someone or to deflect attack — even from an anonymous phone interviewer. Of course, mischief fits right into this, assuming it's true.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Insofar as the accuracy of surveying students about their pop culture preferences, this article I dug up years ago is relevant:
Kyoko Koizumi. "Popular Music, Gender and High School Pupils in Japan: Personal Music in School and Leisure Sites". Popular Music, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 107-125
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/853589

Both in private and when interviewed with others, boys tended to state more personal choices, but when questioned for reasons for their choices, used all sorts of hipster rationalization tricks to make them more artistically acceptable.

If interviewed with others, girls stuck to socially acceptable (already popular) choices, but didn't try to dress up the more personal choices given if interviewed in private.

Crayon Trot (again)

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

Crayon Pop have released a retro-style synth-trot song called 헤이 미스터 (Hey Mister) for the soundtrack of the upcoming drama Trot Lovers.

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Someone on reddit said "Its got cowbells. No more need to be said." But it's also got orchestra hits and clattering drum machine drums, a romantic piano interlude and a little trot squiggle at the end. Here's the instrumental.

And here's an old video of Soyul singing some real trot, complete with authentic trot finger-wagging:

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Mr. Hay

[koganbot]

synth-trot song called 헤이 미스터 (Hey Mister)

Which Google Translate usefully translates as "Mr. Hay."