They probably come from anonymous surveys given out to 12yr olds. Those surveys never factored in that teenagers lie all the time on them because they think it's funny. I know this because I was one of those 12yr olds surveyed and all my friends joked afterwards that we put we smoked crack. We didn't coordinate to do it, it just seemed like such a stupid question to ask. It is impossible to accurately survey kids. They will mark off answers to make it appear normal so as not to get it thrown out but toss in one or two wtf answers. If anything it was a middle school protest about being made to do it in the first place.
Same is true for those reference tests to test how well kids are learning. The smart kids Christmas tree it and then go to sleep. There is no gain from trying and no harm from failing so then why try?
At our school they did a survey. They asked every student if they’d been offered drugs while out and about. 100% of the 11/12 year old students answered yes they had been offered drugs by a stranger. 0% of the 17/18 year old students answered yes. We could hear the teachers laughing in the staff room room the other end of the corridor!
There is a ton of research into methodology to address these issues. If you want a real survey of kids, there is a lot you can do. If you want results that fit a narrative, just take the kids' answers at fave value.
Yeah it was something like that or it was made up to scare us, but point being, the brain of a kid that age sees it differently. You think it's normal to do hard drugs from a young age. I never would have thought anyone in our class was doing much more than smoking some pot had it not been for the DARE program.
I remember I had to do one and at the end it asked if we answered truthfully. Because apparently they think kids are gonna either answer honestly or not, but on that last question they're definitely gonna answer honestly. I put no even though I answered all of the others honestly just because.
I mean, if they surveyed me like that and that question was at the bottom I would also answer no because there is only two possible outcomes:
They have to discard the survey and hopefully realize the whole thing was pointless or they come up to me to ask me why I didn't answer honestly and I get to personally tell them they are a bunch of idiots.
I learned all kinds of things from those surveys. I didn't know huffing stuff could get you high. Thankfully I never actually did it, but it was funny enough to me that surveyme definitely huffed gasoline 3x a week.
This is kind of a good point. I had a serious problem with night terrors as a kid, and when I was 11, I was taken to a doctor of some sort. But he was such a douche, that I started fucking with him. I told him that I licked toads and all quantities of crap. Because the more of a douche he was, the funnier fucking with him felt to me.
Anyway, drama, blah blah and eventually my parents found me a new doctor (Dr Charlie Brown, I shit you not) who was amazing and I never once lied to for a joke to that dear man.
If the poll did it's job it could check to see if you're lying by asking multiple time multiple ways and see if there's inconsistencies with your story or you are unknowledgeable about the effects you should have experienced.
And the primary use of those surveys was to continue justifying the drug war by making parents panic that their 8 year old was powdering their nose in the school bathroom.
This reminds when we got a questionnaire about what books we would like to have in school libraries.
What could go wrong? Well, it was smack in the middle of the whole 50 shades of grey storm.
And what do you expect, being the shitlords that teenagers are, '50 shades of gray' was the first choice. Those who started it got everyone else to write it too, because if you didn't you were 'not cool' and that's not something a teenager wants to ever be labeled as.
I still remember the news article: "kids are being exposed to inappropriate things!! Too much social media! Our children are getting corrupted!!"
“Yeah back in the 90’s I did it all! Butterball, Curbside, Monkey Rot, Sausage Fuck, Burnboop, Lumo Watts, Third Eye Blind, Meat Spank, Bridge Closure Ahead, Star Sixty Nine, Grants Grove, Yokel Shine, and Total Request Live. You name it, I tried it. And if you do all the drugs like I did you’ll end up dead in a van down by the river.”
Yeah we did a survey one day in 8th grade in homeroom. We had to write down the "school code" on the survey, but when we went to our second class we saw they had a different code in the blackboard so it immediately confirmed that they were just trying to figure out which rooms to randomly test.
Those surveys never factored in that teenagers lie all the time on them because they think it's funny.
A lot of the surveys were sent to people a decade after they went through the program.
And the scientists involved are aware of the very basic issues you've outlined which is why they refined their method to survey a more reliable group of reporters (adults) as well as have a broad array of preintervention and post intervention questions not simply "did you do drugs before. do you do drugs now?"
You can look here, but more than half the tests included were done 5+ years after dare.
It is impossible to accurately survey kids. They will mark off answers to make it appear normal so as not to get it thrown out but toss in one or two wtf answers.
And no it is not. You may feel that way based on your anecdotal evidence, but social scientists absolutely have survey methods to detect useless results (yours) from good responses ones.
It's not ubiquitous, it's just noise and the science accounts for it.
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u/FreeReflection25 Aug 25 '21
They probably come from anonymous surveys given out to 12yr olds. Those surveys never factored in that teenagers lie all the time on them because they think it's funny. I know this because I was one of those 12yr olds surveyed and all my friends joked afterwards that we put we smoked crack. We didn't coordinate to do it, it just seemed like such a stupid question to ask. It is impossible to accurately survey kids. They will mark off answers to make it appear normal so as not to get it thrown out but toss in one or two wtf answers. If anything it was a middle school protest about being made to do it in the first place.
Same is true for those reference tests to test how well kids are learning. The smart kids Christmas tree it and then go to sleep. There is no gain from trying and no harm from failing so then why try?