Wrong isn’t enough: we need interestingly wrong, and this week that came in some research from Stonewall, an organisation for which I generally have great respect, which was reported in the Guardian. Stonewall has conducted a survey, and its press release says it shows that ‘the average coming-out age has fallen by over twenty years’.
People may well be coming out earlier than before – intuitively, that seems plausible – but Stonewall’s survey is flawed by design, and contains some interesting statistical traps.
Through social networking sites, Stonewall asked 1,536 people – who were already out – how old they were when they came out. Among the over-sixties, the average age was thirty-seven; those in their thirties had come out at an average age of twenty-one; in the group aged eighteen to twenty-four, the average age for coming out was seventeen.
Why is the age coming down? Here’s one reason. Obviously, there are no out gay people in the eighteen-to-twenty-four group who came out at an age later than twenty-four; so the average age at which people in the eighteen-to-twenty-four group came out cannot possibly be greater than the average age of that group, and certainly it will be lower than, say, thirty-seven, the average age at which people in their sixties came out.
For the same reason, it’s very likely indeed that the average age of coming out will increase as the average age of each age group rises. In fact, if we assume (in formal terms we could call this a ‘statistical model’) that at any time, all the people who are out have always come out at a uniform rate between the age of ten and their current age, you would get almost exactly the same figures (you’d get fifteen, twenty-three and thirty-five, instead of seventeen, twenty-one and thirty-seven). This is almost certainly why ‘the average coming-out age has fallen by over twenty years’: in fact you could say that Stonewall’s survey has found that on average, as people get older, they get older.
But there is also an interesting problem around whether, with the data it collected, Stonewall could ever have created a meaningful answer to the question ‘Have people started coming out earlier?’ It’s a difficult analysis to design, because in each age band there is no information on gay people who are not yet out, but may come out later, and also it’s hard to compare each age band with the others.
You could try to fix this by restricting all the data to include only those people who came out under the age of twenty-four, and then measure the mean age of coming out for each age group (eighteen-to-twenty-four, thirties, sixty plus) in this subgroup alone. That would give you some kind of answer for this very narrow age band, but even that makes some very dubious statistical assumptions. And if we allowed ourselves this move, we’d then be working with an extremely small set of data: only thirty-three respondents aged over sixty, for example.
Even then, the discussion of this poll also assumes that the age at which people know their sexuality has remained unchanged. Some believe that everyone’s sexuality is fixed and known from birth – I may be walking into a minefield here – but if the age at which people recognise their own sexuality is changing, then a more relevant figure by which to measure discomfort at coming out might be the delay, rather than the absolute age.
I thought I’d already covered all the ways that a survey could get things wrong, but this one brought something new. Maybe we should accept that all research of this kind is only produced as a hook for a news story about a political issue, and isn’t ever supposed to be taken seriously. In any case, my intuition is that a well-constructed study would probably confirm Stonewall’s original hypothesis. But it’s still fun to dig.