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Monday, May 11, 2015

Remember Mark Regnerus?

And his "study" on people raised by gay parents? Except that almost none of them were:

In an upcoming article, a pair of sociologists are putting what they call the “final nail in the coffin” of the much-criticized study by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus that purported to show that being raised by gay and lesbian parents harms children. The Regnerus study has become a favorite tool of Religious Right activists seeking to show that households led by same-sex couples are bad for children. At the same time, the study has come under scrutiny for the funding it received from anti-gay groups and for its lack of respondents who were actually raised in same-sex parent households.

Indiana University's Brian Powell and the University of Connecticut’s Simon Cheng didn’t just find methodological flaws in Regnerus’ research — they took the data he collected, cleaned it up, and redid the study, coming to a very different conclusion about families led by same-sex couples.

It seems that not only was the methodology flawed, but a significant portion of the data was suspect:

By eliminating suspect data — for example, a 25-year-old respondent who claimed to be 7’8” tall, 88 pounds, married 8 times and with 8 children, and another who reported having been arrested at age 1 — and correcting what they view as Regnerus’ methodological errors, Cheng and Powell found that Regnerus’ conclusions were so “fragile” that his data could just as easily show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents don’t face negative adult outcomes. . . .

Many people who he categorized as having been raised by a gay or lesbian parent had spent very little time with that parent or with his or her same-sex partner. Even Regnerus admitted that his data included only two people who said they had been raised for their entire childhoods by a same-sex couple.

There are also serious questions about the genesis and conduct of the study, as well as its publication -- why was it accepted for publication before the data analysis was complete? for example. (The article at the link strikes me as a little shrill, even verging on sensationalistic, but seems, ultimately, to be well-documented. A more concise and less slanted summary is at Wikipedia.)

Of course, this won't affect Anti-Gay, Inc.'s use of the study -- they'll just mutter something about "the gaystapo" and keep on citing it.

2 comments:

NPT said...

The ChrisTaliban like fake "scientific" studies. It justifies the loony tunes in the heads

Hunter said...

I call it "faith-based science," in which you formulate your conclusions first and then find data to support them, ignoring any data that doesn't.