A scholarly controversy in progress

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.

A Visual Stimulation

Here's an impressive graph by Brendan Griffen showing how people have influenced each other through the ages. According to the creator, the data comes from anyone with a Wikipedia page that contains an "influenced by" heading. The colors are:

• Red – 19th/20th century philosophers
• Green – antiquity & enlightenment philosophers
• Pink – enlightenment authors
• Yellow – 19th/20th century authors (~fiction/philosophy)
• Orange – fiction authors
• Purple – comedians

A useful tool, perhaps, as we near the end of the summer

Hey Everyone!


As we're starting to get near to the end of the summer, I'm beginning to think about a task Lisa Young, the undergraduate thesis wonder woman for archaeology, set to me and the others in my cohort: drawing out a concept map for our projects. 


Here's the description of the task, from Lisa herself:


Put a general word or phrase that sums up your research topic on one side of the paper and a word or phrase that summarizes the type of information you are collecting at the other side and write down all the concepts and/or references that you think will be important to connect them.  Think about how you will justify why your case studies are important for answering the research question(s) you are developing and why the research is important in the area where you are working.  This concept map is meant to be useful for you so you can organize it in whatever way helps you think about the connection between your general research questions and your data – think connection is one of the difficult aspects of archaeology and research in general.


I thought I'd share this idea with everyone because I like thinking visually and I'm assuming others do to, and I anticipate this being a useful tool in terms of summing up what research I've done so far for my project and where the holes are that I still need to fill in. 


I thought it would maybe be cool (if other people are interested in this) to post our concept maps on the blog once created to see how others are conceptualizing their research, theories, and general project. It might be an interesting experiment in the efforts of interdisciplinarity. Just a thought. 


See y'all soon!

Resources for Social Sciences

Here is a link to some potential resources, geared for the social sciences. Hopefully it will be of some use to some of you! In particular, the first link on the page about proposals is particularly useful to all of us as we begin writing our proposals.

http://www.gradschool.umd.edu/Writing_Resources/Colleges/Social%20Science%20Resources.html

Two theoretical/statistical questions about directions of correlations, forgive my statistical ignorance, I really need help!

1. When I search for relevant articles to support my arguments, I often come across correlational studies. Often, the correlations found from regression models seem non-directional (e.g. life satisfaction and self-esteem can influence each other bidirectionally) but the articles often base their discussion on one direction of the correlation (e.g. life satisfaction can be predicted from self-esteem). Would it still be appropriate to cite the same study in support of "self-esteem can be predicted from life satisfaction"?
2. Can a longitudinal design really eliminate the plausibility of having a correlational conclusion in a direction opposite to your prediction? This is what I found in one article, but it seems like most people assume the directions of certain correlations without doubt, especially if it is based on longitudinal studies. "On a more general level we believe that there are three common, important and less widely recognized misunderstandings with respect to longitudinal study designs in occupational health psychology. The first of these is that we can prove causality by using longitudinal study designs. The extent to which causal inferences can be made depends on the following four conditions: temporal ordering of the focal variables, the strength of the statistical association between them, theoretical plausibility of the presumed causal relationship, and exclusion of plausible rival hypotheses for this relationship (2, unpublished manuscript by de Lange et al). While the first three conditions are relatively easy to satisfy with a longitudinal design, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that particular associations are due to variables that were not measured in the study design. Thus we can never prove causal relationships; the best we can do is argue that it is plausible that certain statistical associations can be understood in causal terms." 

Higgs Boson Explained in Animation!!

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1489

A Comic about Research.... very fitting

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1506