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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 31, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Does anyone know how accurate these studies are

I mean, they are social science, so we're not starting off at a great point to begin with.

The Cameron & Cameron (2017) piece you link is primarily a defense of their Homosexual Parents paper from 1996, but that consisted of sending out surveys during the 1980s, starting with a 1983 survey sent to 9k adults (4340 responses) in LA, DC, Omaha, Denver, and Louisville, and a 1984 survey in Dallas going to 10k adults (5182 responses). In those surveys, the closest question to "same-sex parents" was if "one of [respondant's] parents was a homosexual"... which "was not asked in the 5-city study".

Being charitable to the level of naivety and assuming that the weird procedural changes were totally just meant to better serve the data, it's hard to think of worse ways to establish this question. Even outside of the lizardman constant problems or the tiny sample size, this isn't the same question, especially during that day and age, and there's no way to separate 'are children raised by same-sex parents more likely to be victims of sexual abuse' from 'are children sexual abused by their parents more likely to know their parent's orientation', esp given that the paper never gives base rates or overall rates.

The Sullins paper is pointing toward his 2015 work, most relevantly "The Unexpected Harm of Same-sex Marriage: A Critical Appraisal, Replication and Re-analysis of Wainright and Patterson’s Studies of Adolescents with Same-sex Parents", which does have the section "Over two-thirds (71% SE 30) of the children with same-sex married parents who had ever had sexual intercourse reported that they had been forced to have sex against their will at some point" and perhaps more shockingly that 38% of all respondents, not just those who had sexual intercourse, if they'd been forced to give or receive sexual touch or intercourse from a parent or caregiver.

There's some weirdness here, not all of which is from Sullins -- while he excludes almost half of what Wainright called lesbian parents on the basis of male adults in the household, the original survey gatherers made some bizarre decisions where the same survey segment was used to only to ask males if they had raped someone and only to ask females if they had been raped -- but combination makes the numbers less useful. Sullins is implying-without-stating that female children are being molested by lesbian parents in this sample by staggering numbers, but it's far from clear that's what actually was asked in the question. Yet at the same time, unmarried parents have zero odds?

((There's also a GRIM failure; 37.8% doesn't come as a reasonable division for any of the combinations I can provide as possible counts for total same-sex couples. Might just be a rounding error if it's the 17 'real' lesbian couples, around 40% of which identified as married, but then it's an N=3.))

Especially given the other assumptions (esp that men should only be asked if they forced someone into sex, and women only if they were forced), I'm curious if this reflects a number of victims of familial sexual abuse in one family environment then having sole custody and/or being adopted by lesbians later, but there's not data for it, just a story.

((Separately, he also wrote in 2015 "Emotional Problems among Children with Same-Sex Parents", and that's at least procedurally not-crazy: pull in NHIS surveys for sexual relationships, look at reported emotional problems and some developmental disabilities, and saw larger values (generally 2x). There's a bunch of interesting modeling, but a lot of it points to gay parents having more emotional problems themselves, and adopted kids having more emotional problems and developmental disabilities (and gay parents being more likely to adopt). But it's not really relevant here.))

should this be dispositive evidence against allowing same-sex couples to adopt?

I think you need some data with more than double-digit total same-sex couples or non-trivial number bad actors, for starters, and then some more serious effort to isolate molestation within the same-sex couple (or adoption).