There is an a priori expectation that children growing up in a family outside the biological norm will be disadvantaged in some way or ways. So pro-homosexual groups have been keen to refute that.
How keen they are can be seen in the study reported below. Its introductory elements were reported in a leading medical journal long before any results were in. "Watch out for good news" seems to be the implicit message of that. In my entire academic career I have never before seen the preamble to a research report published before the report itself.
And, in addition to that, we now have a "preliminary report" of the findings issued by way of a press release -- although it is acknowledged that the study is still half done. Press release science reporting is dubious enough as it is without adding to it that the study in incomplete.
To be assigned any credibility the normal scientific criterion is that an article has passed peer review. Not only has this report not passed peer review, it is not even ready for peer review.
As an author with a large number of published papers in social psychology, I would be regarded as a person qualified to do a peer review of the work. So I decided to do a review of what we have so far. I was however handicapped by the lack of detail made available so far.
I did however find two methodological limitations. 1). Most of the parents (80%) were lesbians so this is essentially a study of what happens in lesbian homes only. 2). There appears to have been no control for social class.
I also found that the study detected NO differences in mental health. Only physical health was different. Given the obvious role of experimenter expectations (the Rosenthal effect) in the research, the lack of mental health differences must have been disappointing. One imagines that psychological superiority in the lesbian-reared kids was expected.
So the one difference found, better physical health, is a puzzle for us all. Nobody of any orientation expected that. And the authors can only speculate about its causes. It doesn't float anyone's boat.
There is however a glaring methodological lacuna that could explain the finding quite well: The failure to control for social class. Social class is one of the best known predictors of better health generally. So if the homosexual families studied were of a higher social class, all would become clear. And from the sparse details given about recruitment of the families it seems to me highly likely that recruits were indeed more likely to be middle class.
So we are just seeing the boring old class effect in this data again: Nothing else. The one positive finding is readily explained without any reference to sexual preferences. The bright-eyed faith behind the study is rather chopped up by Occam's razor.
And once we start talking about class, another fact emerges. Middle class children should have been BETTER in psychological health. That they were not in this study indicates that their expected psychological advantage was being cancelled out by something else: Their abnormal family arrangements?
So, if anything, this study confirms an adjustment deficit in the children of lesbian families. About children in male homosexual families it tells us nothing.
Children with same-sex parents are healthier than those with heterosexual parents, new Australian research suggests.
Children aged five to 17 who live with gay parents have ‘significantly better’ general health than those with heterosexual parents.
There is also greater family cohesion in families led by same-sex parents, the research shows.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, studied 500 children aged between one and 17 as part of The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families.
For general health and family cohesion children aged 5 to 17 years with same-sex parents showed a significantly better score when compared to Australian children from all backgrounds and family contexts.
The children of same-sex couples scored so much higher for general health that researchers said it would only occur by chance less than 1 in 10,000 times.
However, for all other health measures, including self-esteem and emotional behaviour, there were no statistically significant differences.
Currently, the researchers do not know why the children of same-sex parents have better general health and family cohesion.
The lead researcher on the study, Dr Simon Crouch, told The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Because of the situation that same-sex families find themselves in, they are generally more willing to communicate and approach the issues that any child may face at school, like teasing or bullying.
‘This fosters openness and means children tend to be more resilient. That would be our hypothesis.’
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).
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