However, having the best seat in the house does not make one a useful critic, especially if one can’t distinguish between an opera and a musical.

That’s what I wanted to say all the time (but didn’t because I was trying to keep up with reading everything that was written about this study).

If you want to study something that only is present in a tiny minority, a random population sample just will not work for you.

If you want to study the health implicatons of extensive running (50 miles and more), a random sample won’t work either, because chances are that you will find less than one such runner in your sample of 15000. You will have to contact sports clubs, running events, (ultra-)running magazines etc. to recruit your participants.

Same if you want to study a rare disease: You will contact hospitals, doctors, selfhelp groups but not look in a random sample just to find that your searched feature is not present there.

BTW: The children of the longitudinal study (NLLFS) are now around 22 to 24. http://www.nllfs.org/ So data about planned samesex families are available – and Mark Regnerus knows it, as he mentions the NLLFS and other studies several times in his paper.

In the most recent entry, as I write this, #4: Have I convinced you that you’re wrong? http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/features/2012/gay_parents_study/the_gay_parents_study_what_does_no_difference_really_mean_.html Saletan hits on these central issues (read the whole thing for the evaluation on his answers:

“1. Does the New Family Structures Study show any difference in child outcomes between IBFs (intact biological families) and same-sex households of similar duration? No.

“2. Does the NFSS show that gay parents, per se, are more prone to unstable relationships than straight parents are? No. Because… all the kids in the sample were born between 1971 and 1994, [when]gay sex was illegal in many states, and gay marriage was illegal everywhere.

“3. Does the NFSS provide a more statistically valid sample of same-sex households than prior studies have offered? No…. We end up with a bunch of “no difference” samples from prior studies, skewed by education and socioeconomic status, versus an NFSS sample skewed by a focus on relationship behavior rather than family structure.

“4. Does the NFSS shift the burden of proof to those who claim “no difference”? You argue that it does, based on the size and randomness of your sample, combined with the known effects of instability in studies of adoption and stepfamilies. But both of your arguments are confounded by other factors.

Finally (and the “two questions” referenced here are long and hard to summarize), Saletan makes this observation: “The NFSS, with its preconceived focus on comparing IBFs to parents who had gay relationships—that is, comparing a structure to an orientation—seems designed to conflate the two questions. Unlike your harsher critics, I think this conflation was a blind spot, not a strategy.”

I think Saletan’s last point is well-taken. Clearly, Regnerus’s previous work suggests he has a bias that intact biological families are superior to other family structures. That is part of why Witherspoon would choose him rather than one of the authors of the 59 previous studies to lead this research. That that could have led him to confuse a sexual orientation with a family structure in the pursuit of this research is quite possible.

It will be interesting to see Regnerus’s response to this. If Saletan is right, it will be an interesting response, one the Witherspoon institute will be unlikely to link to.

(I would also be unsurprised to learn that Saletan has been reading the discussion here at BTB.)

Alright so I went and read Rosenfeld’s research which was incidentally used during the Prop 8 Trial.

HERE is FINALLY one LARGE SAMPLE research paper that compares how children do for these catagories. (Remember same gender civil marriage was not legal in any State in 2000)

Cohabiting Lesbian Couples
Cohabiting Gay Couples
Cohabiting Heterosexual Couples

Guess what? The children of Lesbian and Gay Cohabiting couples did BETTER than the children of Cohabiting Heterosexual Couples.

The study looked at what ages the children were for their grade. They were looking for kids who had flunked and were thus older.

http://www.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_Nontraditional_Families_Demography.pdf

Actually that was a really good study so I see why Regnerus references it. The study is based on the US 2000 Census

I use U.S. census data to perform the first large-sample, nationally representative tests of outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples. The results show that children of same-sex couples are as likely to make normal progress through school as the children of most other family structures. Heterosexual married couples are the family type whose children have the lowest rates of grade retention, but the advantage of heterosexual married couples is mostly due to their higher socio economic status. Children of all family types (including children of same-sex couples) are far more likely to make normal progress through school than are children living in group quarters (such as orphanages and shelters).

Regnerus claims, “Oh my study is better I measured 40 different outcomes and I asked a lot more questions, such as have you ever been inappropriately sexually touched by a parent”

BUT Regnerus does a poor (I was going to use a different word there) job identifyling Lesbain and gay headed homes. He divines this by his famous question of “While you were growing up until age 18 did either one of your parents have a romantic relationship with someone of thier same sex?” Then he followes this up with his calendar where the adult kids write down who they lived with from birth to age 18. Regnerus is asking the *kids* to make a judgment call if they thought their parents ever had a gay fling. He never asks the parents.

The beauty of the census is that the adults, the parents are directly asked if you are gay or lesbian or not. So there is no guessing or I would say Regnerus *divines* if the kid grew up in a same sex headed home.

While it IS true that the Rosenfeld research simply measures if a kid is age appropriate for his class and not anything else, at LEAST we get to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges and in fact the gay parents DID BETTER, thank you very much!!! My take away is that the Rosenfeld data is more limited but a hell of a lot more accurate.

The sample may be random, but what he did with it is far from random. It was a deliberate and faulty re-categorisation of part of the data set, leading to a deliberate and faulty conclusion.

He “branded” 163 women as Lesbian Mothers
But we see that 56 (34%) never even lived with their “branded” Lesbian Mother. We don’t know that they are Lesbians AT ALL. For all we know “romance” could have been a single kiss.

Keep in mind that he only keeps a calendar of where the *kids lived.* He does not keep a calendar of where the parents lived. So these missing 56 or 34% of “Lesbians” Mothers very well could have run off and gotten married to a man.

The child believes mom kissed a woman (we don’t know because we never ask Mom) kid moves out of mother’s home and into a home with anybody *other than* her mother and never lives with her mother again. Mother marries a man and lives happily ever after for 35 years. NOW Shall we say that the kid had a Lesbian Mother?

He needs to get off of that Lesbian Word and start using the scientific term WSW, Women who have Sex with Women. And really we don’t even know if there was ANY Sex involved at ALL for 34%. It could have been a kiss. It is probably just more messed up heterosexuals skewing the results.