http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/25/high-school-students-cheating/1719297/
·
Students who
said they had cheated on an exam in the past year plunged from 59% in 2010 to
51% in 2012.
·
The number of
students who said they lied to a teacher in the past year about something
significant fell from 61% in 2010 to 55% in 2012.
·
In 2010, 27%
of pupils said they had stolen from a store in the past year. In 2012, 20% said
they did so.
This article, explores
the results from the Josephson Institute of Ethics in which their survey a portion
of 23,000 high school student in reference to cheating, lying or stealing. In this article, I find two main problems:
1. How the
results are interpreted by the Joseph Institute of Ethics
Joseph Institute of
Ethics is “a nonprofit organization dedicated to
improving the ethical quality of society.”
The Joseph institute concludes the results are positive, yet this
interpretation is biased by the mere organization purpose.
Quoting the article,
this situation is "a pretty good sign that things
may be turning around." The problem with this article resides
merely in the wording through which the survey results are framed. As we can
notice, this survey uses the amount of students that “admit” cheating, lying or
stealing. The fact that less students are admitting they cheated doesn't mean
they got more honest. A reduction in students admitting these actions might
actually mean that the students are lying on the survey itself, and thus, that
they might be less honest.
2. The cursory presentation of the survey results
Surveying methods in statistics are
really complex due to the effects the wording of the question can have on the
people. As we can see from the article, we are not given the questions that the
students were asked. Creating a
situation similar to giving the results of an experiment without even
explaining how the experiment was executed.
Sources
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/25/high-school-students-cheating/1719297/
http://josephsoninstitute.org/
I agree that this study is problematic, especially because there is no way to know for sure how many people are answering honestly or even accurately. For example, if you ask students if they've stolen something in the past year, they could either honestly say no, honestly say yes, lie and say no (or yes), or qualify it--they only stole one little thing, so it doesn't count. Or they stole not from a store, but from someone else, or pirated media.
ReplyDeleteThis article (http://www.trueresults.com/news/more-half-texans-lie-about-health-and-fitness-habits) reports that more than half of the Texans they sampled lied to their family members or doctors about their health habits, most because they were embarrassed to admit their real habits. Even in this report, I have to assume there's a good chance some people still lied about lying, because the subjects self-reported their own habits.
People are historically very bad at looking at themselves objectively, so studies in which subjects report their own activities should always be taken with a grain of salt, and then some.