A relatively high profile academic controversy has arisen around the publication of a recent paper in Social Science Research called "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study". The author, Mark Regnerus, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Here is the paper's abstract.
Abstract
The New Family Structures Study (NFSS) is a social-science data-collection project that fielded a survey to a large, random sample of American young adults (ages 18–39) who were raised in different types of family arrangements. In this debut article of the NFSS, I compare how the young-adult children of a parent who has had a same-sex romantic relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional, and relational outcome variables when compared with six other family-of-origin types. The results reveal numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married (heterosexual) biological parents. The results are typically robust in multivariate contexts as well, suggesting far greater diversity in lesbian-parent household experiences than convenience-sample studies of lesbian families have revealed. The NFSS proves to be an illuminating, versatile dataset that can assist family scholars in understanding the long reach of family structure and transitions.
Response to this paper has been highly charged, even in the academic community. I have not tried to follow it all, but expect it would be interesting for some of you to explore. For a few entry points, you might read these two opposing columnists from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The first, Laurie Essig, points out weaknesses in the article and calls into question its intentions. In a second essay, Essig generalizes her critique, stressing that research is not made more objective simply through application of larger data sets.
The second, Peter Wood, generally defends Regnerus, especially endorsing the usual scholarly process, rather than special administrative investigations, as the right way to criticize work like this.
Regnerus himself wrote less formally about this in Slate.
Since we will have Al Young, the Chair of the Sociology Department with us on Thursday, I thought some of you might want to take a look at all this and discuss it with him.
Whatever is going on here (and I truly don't know), it is an example of the complexity which can emerge from research on topics of current social and political interest.
I can't help but feel at least a somewhat obligated to comment on this since it is kind of my home turf (most of the researchers I work with are family demographers). As far as I can tell, what is most important to consider when evaluating this article is that the author is not comparing the parenting of functional heterosexual couples to that of functional homosexual couples. Although I'm not familiar with the literature personally, it sounds from his own citations like such studies have been done and there are no major differences between the children from these two groups. Instead, the point of this study is to look at a randomly selected, representative sample of children who report having parents who were at some time during their childhood part of a same-sex romantic relationship. The fact of the matter is, and he admits this in the article, many children in this sample started their lives with married, heterosexual parents, and at some point the marriage dissolved and one of the parents started a new same-sex relationship. It is not that surprising that children who grew up with such an unstable family situation ended up with more problems than children whose parents never divorced.
ReplyDeleteTo wrap up, this article doesn’t argue that homosexuals make worse parents than heterosexuals. It argues that most children who have had a parent in a same-sex relationship have had a difficult family situation all along. There doesn’t appear to be anything “wrong” with the scholarship here, but the author really should have foreseen that his findings would be misinterpreted and used as political fuel against homosexual parents. If he was truly concerned with widely spreading the most accurate information, he certainly could have been more explicit about what could and could not be concluded from his analysis.
More news on this: the journal empowered an 'auditor' to look through the publication process. He decided that the six reviewers did not act as they should have and concludes "It's bullshit".
ReplyDeletehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/controversial-gay-parenting-study-is-severely-flawed-journals-audit-finds/30255?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The principal complaint is decision on how to define 'lesbian mothers'. Regnerus uses this label for every family in which the mother has any kind of same sex relationship, of any duration or nature, after the child is born.
It is worth thinking about how many papers, without political implications, could be critiqued in this way. The concern that much research is less than it seems is consistent with Austin's earlier post about the weak statistical conclusions of many papers.
http://hsf2012.blogspot.com/2012/06/is-most-published-research-false.html
Still more news, this time about the funding for this study.
ReplyDeletehttp://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-big-lesson-from-regneruss-bad-gay-parenting-study/50419?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en