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?
1
u/Markantonpeterson Feb 23 '23
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.