"Dangerous" Surveys Posted on March 19, 2007 Joel W. Grube (bio) describes how he responds to teachers who object to surveys on sensitive topics.

We sometimes run into the problem of parents or teachers or principals who ask us if the mere fact that we're conducting the survey will give the kids ideas about things to do. The first time I ran into this was interestingly a study on drinking in a school-based survey and one of the teachers took me aside to let me know that he did not approve of our survey because we would probably give these kids ideas and increase their likelihood of drinking.


My response was that the, we're talking about a 20-minute survey that has a half a dozen or so drinking items on it. Very, very small influence relative to what's going on out in the broader world, where they're dealing with advertising and marketing, with drinking in other venues, parental drinking, peers and so on. So I guess my response when that kind of thing comes up is simply to say that from our perspective the survey is probably not having any effect or such a small effect that you can't detect it.

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