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A 2012 study that drew a firestorm over its conclusion that children of parents in same-sex relationships fared worse on various social and emotional outcome variables compared with those in other family structure types has now been vindicated.
University of Texas at Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus, who conducted the highly disputed study, wrote that, “[w]hen compared with children who grew up in biologically (still) intact, mother-father families, the children of women who reported a same-sex relationship look markedly different on numerous outcomes, including many that are obviously suboptimal (such as education, depression, employment status, or marijuana use).”
Now, in a newly-published statistical critique by Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth, the researchers reveal that Regnerus’ theory was accurate.
Writing at the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse, Paul Sullins, Ph.D., research professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America, highlighted the work by Young and Cumberworth, explaining how they used their “multiverse of analyses” method to reexamine the Regnerus study.
According to Sullins, the “multiverse of analyses” method has revealed that even seemingly small methodological decisions by researchers conducting studies can lead to very different results and expose potential bias on the part of the investigators.
While other highly disputed studies have “fared poorly” under the new method’s scrutiny, Sullins pointed out, Young and Cumberworth “found something unexpected and remarkable” in the Regnerus research: “not one of the two million significant alternatives resulted in positive outcomes for LGBT-parented children.”
“Although often with smaller effects, every analysis confirmed the Regnerus study’s central finding that children turned out better with intact biological parents than with LGBT parents,” Sullins wrote. “Regnerus’s thesis, it turns out, was not only true in the analytic model in which he presented it: it was true in every analytic model possible.”
To better understand the importance of this development, Sullins provided a timeline of how family structure has been viewed in research studies over the past several decades.
“Until about thirty years ago a longstanding social science consensus held that, compared to other family arrangements, children were most likely to thrive when raised until adulthood by their natural mother and father,” he explained. “Children raised by single parents, subject to the disruptions of parental divorce, or even by adoptive or one or more stepparents, had long been shown to suffer a range of poorer outcomes in emotional health, forming relationships, educational attainment, employment, and more.”
When the field of social science became infiltrated by “left-wing ideologies” that pushed for a removal of restrictions on sexual relationships, however, “the social science journals became flooded with weak, misleading ‘studies,’ often written by politically motivated gay authors, purporting to show that children fared just as well with same-sex parents as with other-sex ones,” Sullins observed.
Regnerus’s arduous research, Sullins noted, produced what is now known as the New Family Structures Study (NFSS), using a sample of nearly 3,000 individuals, including 248 who were raised by same-sex parents.
This outcome, Sullins wrote, was “by far the largest set of primary, statistically representative data on such individuals yet collected.”
“As Young and Cumberworth observe, Regnerus’s study soon became ‘one of the most hotly contested studies in twenty-first-century sociology,’” Sullins explained.
He went on to describe the intense controversy that ensued.
“The almost immediate response was a firestorm of ideological denunciation, personal vituperation, and political pressure,” he recalled. “The findings were widely and vehemently denounced. Hundreds of scholars and activists—the distinction was often unclear—demanded retraction of the study and investigation of Regnerus for misconduct. When the journal editor and university administrators, finding no basis for either action, refused, both were subject to intimidating legal action that went nowhere.”
Despite this original reception, Young and Cumberworth acknowledged their surprise “by the robustness of the Regnerus finding,” Sullins noted.
“Although the critical analyses resulted in reduced estimates of the LGBT parent effect, ‘[o]ur surprise was discovering that in these data a negative effect [of an LGBT parent] is nonetheless still robust and that there are essentially no opposite-signed results [showing any benefit from having an LGBT parent],’” Sullins wrote, quoting the researchers’ comments.
“Future debate is possible, they observe, ‘over the magnitude of the LBGT parent effect or over the quality of the data but not over the existence of an LGBT parent effect in this dataset,’” Sullins reported.
He then summarized the overarching significance of Young’s and Cumberworth’s conclusions regarding the Regnerus study.
“To the extent that the NFSS presents an accurate picture of parenting family structures—and they have their doubts—it presents valid evidence of negative child outcomes that follow from having been exposed, even for a short time, to the involvement of gay or lesbian parents,” Sullins concluded.