Asking Teens About Sex Posted on March 19, 2007 Gaining the trust of teenagers facilitates collection of sensitive data, states Joel W. Grube (bio).

Because our respondents in most of our surveys are young people, say between the ages of 12 and 18 up to 20, we are asking them about a lot of personal behaviors and oftentimes illegal behaviors. Drinking, drinking and driving, drug use. Behaviors they certainly don't want their parents to know about — having sex and so on. So confidentiality becomes a really key issue. And we work very hard to make sure that the data we collect are confidential and that nobody has access to the data other than the research team.

There are certain precautions we take. For example, we do a lot of our interviews actually take place in the home, but we have to work very hard to keep the parents out of the room to make sure that it's a private situation and that the parents fully understand that we're not going to talk to them about anything we learn in these interviews.

The confidentiality is important for a number of reasons. The first one, of course, is to protect the child from anything, any adverse consequences that might happen. If somebody, for example, would find out that they are drinking and driving or using drugs, that could have serious consequences.

Beyond that, the confidentiality is a key issue in getting the kids to tell you the truth, and they have to believe that their data are confidential, or they're going to lie to you, and so we spend a lot of time just working with the kids and convincing them that nobody is going to see this, nobody will get to hear what you have to say or what you put on the questionnaires. And in a way it's a way of boosting the reliability and validity of the data we get as well.

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