Young 'pranksters' skewed landmark sexuality study
news.cornell.edu
news.cornell.edu
Sexual orientation isn't a fixed value that stays the same forever. Especially during teenage years, a lot of people are still unsure of their preferences and may identify a in a certain way at a certain point in time that they won't down the line.
And yes, of course teenagers are likely to check random boxes as well - either to be silly, or because they fear that their results may be identified and used against them by parents/teachers.
None of those 2 things should be shocking for anyone who's ever worked with teenagers.
I had a particularly heated discussion once, with a hetero woman that was sympathizer of gay rights, she was VERY convinced that sexual orientation was fixed, she told me that there is no such thing as "ex-gay", and all "ex-gay" are just closeted homosexuals and will become gay again given enough time.
I gave her some articles about ex-gays complaining about receiving MORE flak after becoming ex-gay than when they were gays (including there is a existance of... closeted hetero, people that were gay, and do not assume to be hetero because both hetero and homosexuals then attack them, assuming he is still a sort of traitor gay), this still did not convinced her.
Then I showed a discourse by Luiz Mott (leading gay rights activist in Brazil), where he claims that he was hetero, and now is gay by his own choice, and that he was NOT born gay.
This STILL did not convinced her, she told me that Luiz Mott was a liar, but only in that case (and that everything else he says is true).
Sometimes people disappoint me.
Trying to pigeonhole people as 'ex-gay' or 'gay by choice' doesn't seem like a useful exercise.
That is a truly remarkable claim that a person with one sexual orientation could choose to change it and become a different orientation.
However, when I examine the discourse in question, I find that the claim is false: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive//ldn/2010/may/10051...
"Although Mott attributed change to people who were "not 100% homosexual," he made it clear ... that he believes that "all human beings have, as Freud said it, a bisexual desire," and that sexual preference is something fluid and changeable."
The claim that people are by default bisexual and choose between two preferences is very much different from the claim that people with one well-defined sexual orientation may arbitrarily change it. The latter doesn't hold up.
You basically presented a collection of anecdotes. That hardly constitutes compelling evidence.
I'm sure there's no shortage of people who will swear quite convincingly that faith healing ceremonies are legit. Doesn't mean I would accept their testimony as evidence, though.
As with any other data, the credibility of anecdotes depends on the credibility of the reporter and evidence.
Anecdotes are not adequate for conclusions that require data, but a single credible anecdote is adequate to counter a universal statement.
What constitutes a credible anecdote?
Obviously the more credible the reporter, the more evidence, the more witnesses - the more credible the anecdote.
Are you implying that no story from a layman can be considered credible, but scientists have some magical power that makes them credible?
Data is mismeasured, misinterpreted, misremembered, or simply made up in studies all the time.
Scale matters. You're basically arguing that because evidentiary errors occur in scientific studies, that all evidence from all sources is therefore equivalent. That's simply not the case.
However, if you insist on maintaining this stance - we'll just have to agree to disagree.
The only discussion then is around the credibility of the example. Scale is completely irrelevant to disproving a universal statement with a counter example.
To give an interesting example, how would you classify a male who is mentally a woman (had not yet had the operation) and into BDSM with both genders? (For the record, I don't do hypothetical examples ...I know enough interesting people that I don't have to.)
In general, if you have a simple model of how people work, it is almost certainly wrong. And if it is both simple and in accord with your personal politics, the likelihood of it being wrong goes way up.
yay for stringing adjectives!
What about a post-top-op, no-bottom-op, FTM that is only into lesbians or bi-women?
When I was coming out, uniformly the response from mature members of the LGBT community was that defining myself was not useful, and that it wasn't important to stress out over whether I self identified as straight, bisexual, gay, queer, or whatever. What's important is that you're happy, that you're not preventing yourself from forming romantic and sexual relationships with people you want to do so with, and that you're not facing discrimination for those relationships.
I've personally had probably a dozen friends who thought they might be bisexual later decide that they were straight (and many who decided they weren't). I applauded them for their open mindedness in seriously considering it, and experimenting to see the truth of the matter (we were all scientists and engineers, after all). After that process, I am certainly more confident that they are actually straight than if they'd just assumed it to be the case without evidence.
So yeah, in my experience people are "born gay" "born straight" or "born flexible". Some people "born straight" experiment with bisexuality, and end up the better for it. Some people "born gay" experiment with heterosexuality, and end up the better for it. And unlike some, I do believe in bisexuality, or being attracted to someone based on personality alone. It's much more rare than a fixed sexuality, but I've definitely met people who very legitimately are interested in both men and women.
The concept of sexuality being fluid can be a touchy topic to gay activists and also some gay people is because of the religious people. If everyone starts to think that sexuality can be changed, the bigots and crazy religious people will put more effort into the conversion therapy. In the current state of the world, that will do more harm than good.
I sometime wonder if sexuality is fixed and if a gene is found for it (and hence a "cure" is available) that the bigots and crazies would be even more vocal.
Which ones? Besides the unnamed one you mentioned, I mean.
In retrospect, there may have been a reason we had to go to so many educational 'assemblies'...
For example, there's a statistically significant amount of men that have sex with other men, but who self-identify as heterosexual. That group might end up in either camp if the survey isn't aware of the issue and phrases the questions badly, which makes quantitative studies much harder to do.
After my generation it just seems to be taken for granted a bit more, and thus uninteresting to youth culture. I realize this is just anecdotal, but suffice it to say that this result does not surprise me in the least and I think researchers are bit out of their depth when they try to ascribe logic to the phenomenon ex post facto. The "data" they have does not reflect the dominant cultural psychology of the time which is paramount in any youth study.
Setting aside the fact that it's hard enough to design a double (triple?) blind study of mice, setting aside the fact that people will lie and joke around for pleasure, how can you ever get past the fact that 'who we are' and 'who we want to be' are inextricably linked?
Would that be a study where the mice are not aware of if they are in the control or not?
Has the placebo effect been seen in mice?
Seriously though, the idea that mice might have a placebo effect is fascinating. I would have thought that the placebo effect would require some high-level form of self-awareness (which perhaps mice do have, I don't really know) and an understanding of at least the purpose of medicine. Maybe not though...
Edited to add: On a more serious note, I don't know if mice are susceptible to a Hawthorne-like effect http://psychology.about.com/od/hindex/g/def_hawthorn.htm Even physical science researchers have to deal with observer effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_%28physics%29
Edited to clean up brain-drained errors.
In brief, any time you have a subjective measurement (for instance, the experimenter assigns a number from 1 to 5 based on how "distressed" the mice -- or human patients -- look), that subjective measurement can be subtly biased. So if the experimenter doesn't blind his experiments properly, you can see a placebo effect in animal studies.
It is appropriate to refer to these studies as double or triple blind because the single blind usually refers to the patient.
Single blind: patients do not know which group they are in
Double blind: experimenters do not know the group identities
Triple blind: overseeing committees do not know the group identities
- http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/relandval.php
- http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/Psy624/Validity.ht...
But basically, the placebo effect only exists for subjective measurements. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Mechanism_of_the_effect) If something exists only in subjective measurements and not objective measurements... I'll let you draw your own inference.
I think we are all getting better at noticing badly designed studies. A while back some study in the UK was publicised saying that nearly a 1/2 of 12 year olds had committed a crime, and 1/4 a violent crime. Yes. 12 year olds. The expected out cry was muted. I assume most people did what i did and imagined a study like this
* researcher walks into playground and asks group of kids if any have ever committed a crime.
- I might have taken a mars bar from the corner shop once. - Well I take a mars bar every week - That's nothing, I take the cash out the till while he is watching you take the mars bars. - yeah well last week he saw me do that so i stabbed the cashier. - Only stabbed him, I took a shotgun the last time and had to reload while the blood was pumping out of his twitching body and I slipped on his guts on the way out of the shop.
1) Adolescents are well known to be more confused about sexuality than adults, often conflate friendship and charisma with sexual attraction, and often experiment with sexuality and later decide what's for them. It's not surprising at all that the number of bisexuals would drop.
2) As I read this, they changed the question from "romantic attraction" to "sexual attraction" between the two surveys. Seriously???
...You can't pay for better monologue material than this.
Generally speaking, surveys from various western countries seem to indicate 1-5% of adults identify as LGBT, with a slightly higher percentage of adults reporting either some same-sex attraction or same-sex sexual experience at some point in their lives. It came as a surprise when surveys revealed a higher incidence of homosexuality among teens (5-7%), who are generally more reluctant to self-identify as LGBT and less likely to be sure of their sexuality; it now appears that those answers were unreliable.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientat... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United...
Assessing sexual tendencies and their occurrence in the population clearly is difficult. But is it really that hard to figure out rates of prosthetic limbs? I'd have thought there was sound data about that. And if those numbers looked funny, why would you trust the rest of the data?
... although I tended to prefer the local fetish club. One night I managed to survive until eight in the morning, and heard all this action coming from the third floor.
"What's going on?", I said... "Some gay porn mate." "Hardcore?" "I presume so."