I look forward to it.

Not even to mention the number of studies or their convergence, which is certainly a big pointer to me that they’re at least finding something consistent.

Dunno, I’m merely a chem geek. People aren’t quite like molecules, though the similarities are sometimes striking.

*shakes head*

Research is important, but there’s a technical term for a sociologist who thinks he or she can make judgements based on nothing more than data points. It’s called “fucking asshole”.

I’d like to focus on a particular study that I think did have a good methodology - and so do the authors of the review paper I read for class - incidentally by one of the authors Lerner and Nagai (2001) criticize.

What is the general consensus in the scientific community regarding Lerner and Nagai’s issues?

As a student, I can’t speak for the psychological community, but my development professors have thus far all agreed that the evidence shows that two parents are better than one, for a variety of reasons, when it comes to socialization, but the gender of the parents does not seem to matter. My feeling would be that over 49 studies, a convergence of evidence pointing to the same results (outcomes for children of same-sex parents are generally the same as for children of heterosexual parents, and where there is a difference, it generally favours the children in same-sex-parent families), there are reasonable grounds for saying that there is no difference. Of course, having just read an extremely up-to-date literature on the effects of family diversity which reached the same conclusion, I may be a bit biased myself.

I would also say that there are some cases where in order to get enough participants for a reasonable sample size, truly random polling may be impossible. For example, when I worked in a lab recruiting participants for research into early cognitive development, I worked from a list of new parents who’d submitted their names to be participants. The people who actually came in to participate were largely affluent and highly educated. This is a biased sample, but it was the most efficient use of limited resources (i.e. busy undergrad volunteers!). Other researchers in the lab had tried to use ads, but the response for recruiting parents with young children was so poor that it wasn’t worth the cost of putting them up.

When you’re trying to get participants from a relatively small group - such as gay parents - I would say that putting up ads or making random phone calls would be a highly inefficient way to recruit participants, so getting participants to suggest other participants seems reasonable. (And I doubt that most psychology labs maintain a list of gay parents to contact for research purposes…) This may not be ideal, but this is why it’s important that results be replicated.

The point is not how Lerner and Nagai have conducted their own research. The point is whether or not the issues they raise are valid regarding the studies they discuss. What is the general consensus in the scientific community regarding Lerner and Nagai’s issues?

http://tinyurl.com/ojmfx