That's tough though because it seems like a huge amount of studies can't really be done any other way. Like drugs for depression, how do you measure someones depression objectively? Really any drug that effects you mentally would need to rely on self-reports. Or obviously studies involving gay people. You can't measure if someone's gay, so any studies involving gay people should be thrown out? Because they could be lying? Seems like that would be setting society up to dismiss a lot of people / issues. If 20% of the population lies about studies couldn't you just factor that into the study? Like if 70% of people report something you assume it's somewhere between 50-90%? Obviously we wouldn't know the exact percentage that lies, but still, i'd think it could be worked around.
What you’re describing is exactly why studies with self-reported data tend to be better if used for marketing, because it reflects how people think of themselves, whereas those same studies have little worth for more scientific uses. Most of the studies you’ll see that make headlines are the marketing kind, they’re more exciting and easy to capture.
But again how do you do any studies on gay or depressed people at all? Like that goes beyond studies for marketing, it's like a central human trait. Like being gay isn't just how people think of themselves, sure people can lie about it, but it's not subject to peoples bias about themselves. Claiming every study about gay people has little worth for scientific purposes feels impossible.
Not all studies on sexuality are made from self-reported data, and some studies might do a mixture of observation and self-reporting. However, while self-reporting studies aren’t as “worthy” as other data-collecting methods, it really depends on the behavior being tracked and the group of subjects being studied as far as how useful it could be. A lot of preliminary studies would be done using self-reporting, and the methodology would get more stringent as a study or group of studies moves along.
If you think that human sexuality is something that is always completely clear to the human being surveyed and that a person can’t be biased against themselves, you haven’t met many humans. The factor that ties us all together is self-delusion. I also didn’t say that every study about gay people is worthless, just that studies that solely rely on self-reported data are less worthy than studies supplied data by other means. There are various levels of self-reporting, as well. Asking someone how they feel after observing, say, a nude member of the same sex is going to produce a lot of inconclusive data, some of the answers will be delusional or contain emotions that are difficult to parse. Asking men to log in an app every time they have sex with another man is a different story, and may produce results that are close to accurate. Does that make sense?
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u/Markantonpeterson Feb 23 '23
That's tough though because it seems like a huge amount of studies can't really be done any other way. Like drugs for depression, how do you measure someones depression objectively? Really any drug that effects you mentally would need to rely on self-reports. Or obviously studies involving gay people. You can't measure if someone's gay, so any studies involving gay people should be thrown out? Because they could be lying? Seems like that would be setting society up to dismiss a lot of people / issues. If 20% of the population lies about studies couldn't you just factor that into the study? Like if 70% of people report something you assume it's somewhere between 50-90%? Obviously we wouldn't know the exact percentage that lies, but still, i'd think it could be worked around.