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The Daily Signal
That Study
Showing Kids With Same-Sex Parents Fare Better? Yeah, the Media Left a
Few Details Out.
Katrina Trinko
July 10, 2014
There’s been no shortage of media coverage of a new study that
purportedly shows that children raised by same-sex partners fare better
than other children.
“Children of same-sex couples are happier and healthier than peers,
research shows,” was the headline of a Washington Post story.
“Largest-ever study of same-sex couples’ kids finds they’re better off
than other children,” proclaimed Vox, while NBCNews.com announced,
“Children of Same-Sex Parents Are Healthier: Study.”
But the actual study is a little more, well, complicated.
In an article published on Public Discourse, University of Texas at
Austin professor Mark Regnerus takes issue with the study’s method.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Melbourne in
Australia, found that “children in same-sex families scored better on a
number of key measures of physical health and social well-being than
kids from the general population,” according to an article written by
one of the researchers on The Conversation.
But the sample surveyed in the study chose to participate. The
Melbourne researchers didn’t randomly select the first 500 same-sex
couples they found, after checking for sufficient
regional/income/educational diversity. Instead, they advertised the
study – and couples found the researchers, not vice versa. Furthermore,
the couples then reported on how their children were – and no outside
party fact-checked those results, or evaluated the children
independently.
Talking about the couples who participated in the study, Regnerus
sounds this note of caution:
[P]articipants—parents reporting about their children’s lives—are all
well aware of the political import of the study topic, and an unknown
number of them certainly signed up for that very reason. As a result,
it seems unwise to trust their self-reports, given the high risk of
“social desirability bias,” or the tendency to portray oneself (or
here, one’s children) as better than they actually are.
Ultimately, Regnerus argues, this study’s methodology is so problematic
the results aren’t worth taking seriously. He concludes:
Until social scientists decide to do the difficult, expensive work of
locating same-sex attracted parents (however defined) through random,
population-based sampling strategies—preferably ones that do not “give
away” the primary research question(s) up front, as [this study] did—we
simply cannot know whether claims like “no differences” or “happier and
healthier than” are true, valid, and on target.
It should come as no surprise the news media trumpeted a study with
these findings. Unfortunately for readers, flawed reporting on a flawed
study does a disservice to everyone.
Read this and other articles with links at The Daily Signal
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