Part 2: More Info about the Study on Adult Children of Parents who have Same-Sex Relationships

Part 2: More Info about the Study on Adult Children of Parents who have Same-Sex Relationships June 11, 2012

Part 2 in a series on the New Family Structures Study I conducted.

Just a few links, as well as the answer to some common criticisms of the study…

The study itself is free and publicly available, beginning today, at this site, together with another study on the matter by Loren Marks (LSU professor), and three comments on the studies, including one by Paul Amato, Penn State sociologist and current president of the National Council on Family Relations.

My short summary piece on the study is up at Slate.com, here, as is William Saletan’s take.

In response to a common criticism about the fact that there are few respondents who reported growing up in stably-coupled lesbian families, I had this to say:

“One of the key methodological criticisms circulating is that–basically–in a population-based sample, I haven’t really evaluated how the adult children of stably-intact coupled self-identified lesbians have fared. Right? Right. And I’m telling you that it cannot be feasibly accomplished. It is a methodological (practical) impossibility at present, for reasons I describe: they really didn’t exist in numbers that could be amply obtained *randomly*. It may well be a flaw–a limitation, I think–but it is unavoidable. We maxxed Knowledge Networks’ ability, and no firm is positioned to do better. It would have cost untold millions of dollars, and still may not generate the number of cases needed for statistical analyses. If randomness wasn’t the key priority, then we could’ve done it. And we’d have had a nonrandom sample that was no better than anything before it. So, while critics are taking potshots, they should remember that there’s a (low) ceiling to what’s possible here. My team of consultants elected to go with the screener questions (including the one about same-sex relationships) that we did, anticipating–accurately, too–that there would be no way of generating ample sample size if we narrowed the criteria (for who counts as a lesbian parent) to the sort that critics are calling for. We figured that, with the household roster/calendar offering the opportunity to identify who you lived with, we’d comfortably get enough cases wherein the respondent reported living with mom and her partner for many consecutive years. But few did.”


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