Children of gay couples academically disadvantaged: study
December 11, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new study has found that children of same-sex couples suffer a marked disadvantage in educational progress when compared to children living with married parents of opposite sexes. The study, spearheaded by Dr. Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University, took a fresh look at data that had previously been analyzed by a Stanford sociologist, Dr. Michael Rosenfeld.
While dozens of preliminary studies have been conducted on the effect of same-sex households on the children in those households, this is reportedly the first study to use data from a full census with a large random sample.
Dr. Rosenfeld’s original analysis of the 2000 census date concluded that children of same-sex couples are do not significantly differ in their levels of academic achievement when compared to children of married heterosexual parents.
But Dr. Alan identified a problem with the control in Rosenfeld’s study: it excluded many same-sex households. In an effort to establish a common denominator in his data set, Rosenfeld only included households that lived in the same house for five years, which excluded 700,000 households from his analysis.
According to Alan, among those 700,000 excluded households is a majority of the same-sex households from the original data set.
Dr. Alan told LifeSiteNews.com, “It turns out that you’re much more likely to be a same-sex household and not live in that house for the last five years and the reason is because the households tend to break apart pretty quickly.”
“So, when he throws out the 700K, he throws out most of the SS households, which is why he was unable to identify an effect,” said Dr. Alan. “They just weren’t there in the data.”
“We put the 700k back in the sample and control whether they lived in the same household or not. This a standard procedure that doesn’t remove SS families from the data set.”
With the problem corrected and same-sex households restored to the data set, Dr. Alan replicated the study.
He found that children of married parents are 35% more likely to make normal progress through school when compared to children who grow up in same-sex households. Children with cohabiting heterosexual parents were 15% more likely to make normal progress and 23% more likely with single moms.
