Why Regnerus Study Still Sets The Mark

Mark Regnerus (not pictured left) is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, research associate at its Population Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. He recently released a study on the effects of same sex parenting that the gay activists are still manifesting over. Dr Regnerus published a 15,000-person study showing that children do best in a household with their married mother and father. He further found that no other family structure works this well and by contrast often did worse.

Craig Young, a GayNZ writer and big supporter of Family First (sarcasm!),  has already had his credibility shot to pieces after being busted for plagiarism.

But there is sudden excitement because in an attempt to discredit Mark Regnerus’ study (which has been backed up by more recent studies), they have gone through his data set with a fine tooth comb – and wow! – they found that two (2) people surveyed were ‘taking the mickey’ and didn’t tell the truth in their responses. That’s right. 15,000 sample size. 2. (Sigh!)

We had the same problem when we did an online petition against the same-sex marriage bill. But after simply deleting those fictitious names, the result was the same. A massive opposition to redefining marriage – which continued right up to the day the gay marriage bill was rammed through.

Anyway, Mark Regenerus has beautifully and accurately slammed the continued challenges on his solid work with an article HERE

Of note, he says

To their credit, the authors helpfully pointed out a handful of cases that were questionable—respondents whose unlikely answers to other questions (like height, weight, etc.) suggest they weren’t being honest survey-takers. Such a critique is certainly fair and welcome; it’s part of the long-term process of cleaning and clarification in any dataset of substantial size.

And here’s the really funny bit

And removing those questionable cases actually strengthened my original analytic conclusions—and the authors say so: “. . . these adjustments have minimal effect on the outcomes . . . these corrections actually increase the number of significant differences . . .”

Hee!

Dr Regnerus then further tears their critique to shreds

“Controlling” Away How Social Reality Works

Powell and Cheng “control” their way to few or no significant differences between children of intact biological families and those who spend time in same-sex couple households. How? By sorting respondents according to the stability of their parents’ same-sex relationships, longevity of time in their household, by pooling together married moms and dads with those who eventually divorced or who shared joint custody throughout the respondent’s childhood, and by adding a control for childhood experience of poverty in addition to the income control I had already employed. (Seventy percent of households with a mother, her same-sex partner, and the respondent child received social welfare at some point.) But there are so few stable same-sex relationships in the data that, when analyzed in this way, the statistical power to detect real differences diminishes considerably. Powell and Cheng  themselves admit this, and the estimates of difference are hence no longer significant. That’s how one can go from a majority of 40 outcome variables displaying significant differences to just one or two. Had stability rather than instability been “endemic” to the same-sex relationships in the NFSS, I would have split the sample myself!

Slam dunk!

It’s a pity that Craig Young and his allies didn’t apply their crap-ometer with the same diligence to all the studies they quote. But we will.

As Loren Marks exposed in his examination of their studies…

Loren Marks, Louisiana State University, analysed the 59 previous studies cited in a 2005 policy brief on homosexual parents by the American Psychological Association (APA).Marks debunks the APA’s claim that “[n]ot a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” Marks also points out that only four of the 59 studies cited by the APA even met the APA’s own standards by “provid[ing] evidence of statistical power.” As Marks so carefully documents, “[N]ot one of the 59 studies referenced in the 2005 APA Brief compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married parents and their children.”

In the words of Craig Young, will Craig Young now acknowledge that all the studies he quotes are shoddy fabrications? Like hell he will. 🙂