I thought people might be interested in this, as it is an extra thing to consider in terms of some of the trans research, some of which is online questionnaire based. It is an article from 2014.
'Mischievous Responders' Confound Research On Teens
But a new research paper points out one huge potential flaw in all this research: kids who skew the results by making stuff up for a giggle. "Mischievous Responders," they're called.
..."We were interested in the disparities between LGBT and non-LGBT youth in suicidal ideation, feelings of belonging, text-message bullying," he recalls. "One of our reviewers asked us, 'How do you know these kids are actually gay?' And giving some thought to it, we said, 'Let's figure out who those kids are.' "
Robinson-Cimpian and his co-author came up with a clever test.
They chose a set of answers on the survey — questions with responses that adolescents were likely to find funny, but ones that were statistically unlikely to be related to being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Their height, for example.
The more of these way-off-base answers that someone gave on these questions, the researchers surmised, the more likely they were to be lying about being LGBT as well.
And they did find a correlation. For example, *41 percent of the students who claimed they were transgender also claimed to be extremely tall or short, and the same percentage also claimed they were in a gang.
This is important because researchers are often the most interested in minority groups, and so the undetected presence of a small number of jokesters can seriously mess up results.*
www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/05/22/313166161/mischievous-responders-confound-research-on-teens