A couple of years ago, I got a question that totally floored me, because it made me realize how easy it is to get the wrong impression about research (and how important it is for researchers to explain their work as carefully as possible, to avoid misunderstandings). After I described how peer relations researchers use classroom- or grade-based sociometric assessments–peer nominations or ratings–to study peer status, a guy raised his hand and asked how kids handle being told that they’re rejected. He interpreted my explanation to mean that researchers go back into the schools to inform participants of their peer status. Yikes.

While I’ve only gotten that question once, I know better than to think that he’s the only person who has ever wondered that same thing.

So, for anyone who has ever wondered: No, we do not share individual research results with our participants. To do so would be not only terribly unethical and just plain mean in many cases, but it’s also a potential threat to the reliability of the data.

I think a lot of people assume we share our results with the kids because we’re psychologists–we’re supposed to be helping, right? And maybe “helping” involves letting kids know how their peers really see them, so that they can make decisions or changes based on that information. But in this case, that information would rarely be helpful, and would often be harmful. Thus, we don’t disclose individual results at all, unless we are concerned about the safety of a participant (and 1) this is rare, and 2) it’s a whole other post).

Many (most?) people don’t realize that the majority of psychologists don’t provide any kind of direct counseling or other services at all—thousands of us are academic psychologists, with careers aimed at understanding thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and brains. We do research. (And teach. Also another post.) Indirectly, we are helping, because we’re doing the research that leads to the development of therapeutic techniques, or prevention or intervention programs, or educational practices, or child welfare policy. But we leave the direct helping to our clinical and counseling psychology colleagues, who are specially trained to provide counseling services. And that’s the way you want it. You definitely don’t want me telling your child that 60% of his peers nominated him as “someone I like the least.” But you do want me studying your rejected child (or your popular child, or your average child, or your bullied child)—because it’s my research, and the research of my academic colleagues, that will ultimately teach us how to help children feel safe and happy at school. And that helps everyone.

FAQ #1: When you ask kids to answer questions about negative behaviors (like aggression), aren’t you giving them ideas about bad things they can do—things they never thought of before?

A: No, and here’s why. There’s a multi-level process involved in creating a study like this, and part of the work at each level involves making sure that the study isn’t going to give anybody any ideas. First, using our expert knowledge of child development, we make our questions age-appropriate. We typically don’t ask young children questions about sexual behaviors, for example. Second, all university-sponsored research studies are reviewed by a committee of faculty and other experts on campus (the Institutional Review Board) to screen for potential concerns. Third, we consult with experts in the field (parents, principals) to make sure that our research methods are a good fit for the kids we’re studying. For example, my students and I recently asked 5th- and 7th-graders to tell us about their acts of relational aggression. We gave them a list of behaviors, and they answered questions about the ones they had recently engaged in. The principal of the middle school felt comfortable with all of the behaviors in our survey, but the elementary school principal did not—at her request, we removed two or three items from the list. Her concern? That most of her 5th-graders had not heard of those particular methods of aggressing before, and that some children might be inspired to give them a try. We trusted her judgment, and she in turn felt more comfortable partnering with our lab for the study.

Many researchers conduct focus groups with children or adolescents before they design a study—to make sure that their surveys capture the typical experiences of their participants, and to prevent the inclusion of material that’s inappropriate.

Beyond all that, I’ve learned that I don’t have a whole lot to teach teenagers about bad behaviors.

Something that several of us on the research team keep coming back to is what a very big difference a couple of years make. Two years and a school transition separate the two grades, but as any parent of adolescents can probably tell you, those two years might as well be twenty.

Our 5th-grade participants were still all about ME. They were impulsive, excitable, and quick to smile. It took many of them several minutes to choose a piece of candy from our “Thank You” grab bag; they had to dig through the entire thing to make sure they were choosing the very best piece of candy in the bag. (This drove their peers bananas, but the very children demanding “Hurry up!” were the same ones spending endless minutes choosing their own candy when their turns came.) They asked questions about the research we were conducting and seemed genuinely interested in the answers. Perhaps most endearingly, many of these kids seemed to enjoy our visits (we were in their classrooms, briefly, every day for a week). I saw smiling faces call out greetings to my research assistants in the hallways, and although the greetings usually went something like “Hey, do we get candy again today?” I could tell that the smiles were about more than candy.

Our 7th-graders were a different bunch. They were more suspicious of our intentions, but they didn’t seem to ask as many questions as their younger peers did. (Maybe being curious isn’t cool.) One boy asked me if participating in the study could affect his chances of getting into college later on; it was an easy question to answer, but I wanted to give him a hug along with my reassurances. 7th-graders were way more concerned about how their actions were seen by their peers. No more taking forever to choose a piece of candy; they looked quickly and grabbed what they could see in a second or two, and we heard “Hey, don’t be like that” from kids when their peers took too long to choose. Thirteen-year-olds keep each other in line in interesting ways. And they weren’t as positive about our visits, at least not openly, but they took our surveys seriously and seemed to have an appreciation for what we are trying to do: Understand them.

So what’s going on in those intervening years that changes kids so dramatically—why do they move from being happy-go-lucky to being more cautious, more reserved? We know that the middle school transition is a tough one for kids. We ask children to move from more personal, more intimate classroom relationships with a small group of peers and one teacher to the much larger social world of the middle school, where they have several teachers and interact with many peers over the course of a day. It must feel overwhelming and impersonal, and at a time when kids need to feel connected to trusted adults, they may not feel like they have opportunities to create those relationships. Research by Jacqueline Eccles and her colleagues has documented other differences between elementary schools and middle schools that may be causing trouble. For example, they argue that just as adolescents are craving more autonomy, they enter schools with more rigid, authoritarian approaches to discipline and order. Just when they crave closer relationships with peers, they find themselves among sometimes hundreds of peers, trying to figure out who they fit in with and who they can trust. Social comparison increases, and kids are concerned about how they look to others (and become depressed when they find themselves lacking.) It’s a recipe for trouble, and when I think of my young participants, some about to make the transition and some who have already done it, I’m proud and impressed that most of them manage to handle it so well.