Mitigating invalid and mischievous survey responses: A registered report examining risk disparities between heterosexual and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning youth.

In a Registered Report, the authors propose a new survey-bias-mitigation method-incorporating inverse probability weighting via boosted regression-to better understand lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBQ)-heterosexual youth risk disparities. This method is tested using the 2019 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-collected Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) national data, which contain 12,847 observations (ages 12-18 [M = 16, SD = 1.25]; 49.1% male [8.7% LGBQ] and 50.9% female [22.4% LGBQ]; nationally representative regarding race and ethnicity). Looking across 44 outcomes, the authors found that the YRBS contains responses that are potentially biased against LGBQ youth in systematic ways, inflating perceived risk for this group in some outcomes. This potential bias is more pronounced among reported males than among reported females, and it is more pronounced for low-incidence outcomes. For example, the steroid-use disparity estimate among reported males reduced by 67%, while the reduction in bullying victimization was small and not statistically significant. The authors discuss robustness of results, the new method, and data policy implications.

Bias From Potentially Mischievous Responders on Large-Scale Estimates of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Questioning (LGBQ)-Heterosexual Youth Health Disparities.

OBJECTIVES: To determine how sensitive estimates of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBQ)-heterosexual youth health disparities are to the presence of potentially mischievous responders. METHODS: We used US data from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, pooled across jurisdictions that included a question about sexual identity for a total sample of 148 960 students. We used boosted regressions (a machine-learning technique) to identify unusual patterns of responses to 7 screener items presumably unrelated to LGBQ identification, which generated an index of suspected mischievousness. We estimated LGBQ-heterosexual youth disparities on 20 health outcomes; then we removed 1% of suspected mischievous responders at a time and re-estimated disparities to assess the robustness of original estimates. RESULTS: Accounting for suspected mischievousness reduced estimates of the average LGBQ-heterosexual youth health disparity by up to 46% for boys and 23% for girls; however, screening did not affect all outcomes equally. Drug- and alcohol-related disparities were most affected, particularly among boys, but bullying and suicidal ideation were unaffected. CONCLUSIONS: Including screener items in public health data sets and performing rigorous sensitivity analyses can support the validity of youth health estimates.