Report: Students jokingly claim to be gay in national survey, 70 percent are straight
A study by a Cornell University developmental psychologist found that statistics about gay youth may be inaccurate because of "jokesters" who claim to be gay or bisexual when they aren't.
Ritch Savin-Williams, who specializes in the subject, said that many students initially claim to be gay, then later identify as straight because they were either joking or confused.
He added that many researchers choose to ignore this problem, and continue to use the statistics found in the study.
"It's not that we saw something that no one else had seen," Savin-Williams said in an article in Los Angeles Times. "But they kept using the data; people should have said, 'Hold on here, who are these kids?'"...