When the pot calls the kettle black
I mentioned a while back that I wasn't a big fan of the way that Mark Regenerus did his research, yet it seems as though there are a lot of instances of the pot calling the kettle black. In that article I also mentioned the following bit of an LA Times piece:
[N]o scholarly research, including the Regnerus paper, has ever compared children of stable same-sex couples to children of stable different-sex couples, in part because an adequate sample size is hard to come by.
Yet, the level of opposition that he's receiving, though unsurprising, although seems a bit unwarranted and hypocritical. To quote a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled An Academic Auto-da-Fé:
His sample [population] was a clear improvement over those used by most previous studies on this topic. ... Those who are attacking Regnerus cannot admit their true political motives, so their strategy has been to discredit him for conducting "bad science." That is devious. His article is not perfect—no article ever is. But it is no scientifically worse than what is routinely published in sociology journals. Without a doubt, had Regnerus published different findings with the same methodology, nobody would have batted a methodological eye. Furthermore, none of his critics raised methodological concerns about earlier research on the same topic that had greater limitations, which are discussed in detail in the Regnerus article. Apparently, weak research that comes to the "right" conclusions is more acceptable than stronger studies that offer heretical results.
Try, e.g., this article which includes:
based strictly on the published science, one could argue that two women parent better on average than a woman and a man, or at least than a woman and man with a traditional division of labor. Lesbian coparents seem to outperform comparable married heterosexual, biological parents on several measures, even while being denied the substantial privileges of marriage.
The typical problem in these sorts of studies are things like tiny sample groups and biased selection of research subjects.
A second article article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes the following:
Regnerus disclosed the Bradley Foundation and Witherspoon Institute’s sponsorship of the study, acknowledging their conservative pedigrees and asserting that “the funding sources played no role at all in the design or conduct of the study, the analyses, the interpretations of the data, or in the preparation of this manuscript.”
His disclosure squares with the code of ethics of the American Sociological Association, which does not prohibit sociologists from taking research funding from any particular funding source as long as the researcher discloses that relationship.
However, UT-Austin's standard appears to be stricter. “It is the policy of the University of Texas that research is conducted with integrity and free from any actual or apparent institutional or personal conflict of interest,” says the university’s Compliance and Ethics Guide. Texas researchers, the policy says, “must insure that there is no reasonable expectation that the design, conduct, and reporting of the research will be biased by any significant financial interest of an investigator responsible for the research or other educational activity.”
If they actually applied UT-Austin's Compliance and Ethics guidelines in the same way as some are arguing they should be applied to Regnerus, you'd have to wonder just how many of his opponents would also wind up in violation.