Secrecy Surveys

    We distributed this survey to 4th and 7th graders to see how they felt about secrets. The first question, who would you share a secret with?, showed interesting results. More girls, 7th and 4th grade, would tell their friend a secret, apposed to the boys, who were more likely to tell a parent. This could mean that boys are more insecure about revealing secrets to their friends, perhaps fearing that their friends will use their secret to tease or bully them.The second question, is it hard to keep a secret?, received an almost equal ratio of yes's to no's, across all grades and sexes. This shows that it really depends on the person and whether or not they find it difficult to keep a secret as an individual. The third question, are keeping secrets bad?, obtained a variety of results. More of the older kids believed that it wasn't bad to keep a secret. The younger kids had relatively fewer votes that were pro-secret keeping. Between the gender, girls were more likely to say that secrets were not bad, while a large portion of the boys voted that it is not good to keep a secret. In question 4, can keeping secrets hurt a relationship?, very few kids put "no". Even the younger kids have experienced the strain that secrets put on a relationship. Even though many kids answered that secrets do strain relationships, in question 3, many also answered that it is okay to keep secrets. When is it okay to keep secrets? And who is it okay to keep secrets from? When asked if they ever felt the need to keep secrets, the majority of students answered yes, with the younger kids saying no a few more times than the older. Again, this begs the question of when is it okay to keep a secret. And are secrets ever truly necessary? For example, does the CIA and government need to keep their operations secret from the public. Is Wikileaks doing us a service by releasing "secret" documents into the public? On question 6, most people answered that secrets are not a form of lying. People distinguish the two. When asked to elaborate on what is the difference between a secret and a lie, one fourth grade girl wrote "A lie is when you tell something that isn't true. A secret is something that you tell that you don't want other people to know about." Many of the students made the distinction between a lie and a secret by stating that a lie is not true, while a secret is usually true. Most kids also seemed to think that lies were bad and meant to cause harm, while secrets were things that you just want to keep private and not tell anyone else. A 7th grade boy who believed that a secret is a form of lying wrote "A secret is when you don't tell everything you know or the whole truth, which is a form of a lie." The last question asked kids to share their emotions after being told a secret. The girls mostly answered "excited" while boys answered "vengeful". This could account for the difference in question number one, where girls were more likely to tell a secret to a friend than boys were. This shows that boys are less likely to share secrets with their friends because their friends feel that they can use that information against the other boy in a "vengeful" way. Frequent responses in the other category included "guilty," "upset," and "trusted," showing both the good and bad sides of secrets.