That time when your research is used to justify ripping a baby from the arms of its loving adoptive parents

UPDATE: Judge Johansen has rescinded his order. 

Brad Wilcox and Mark Regnerus lost in their attempt to turn the federal courts against marriage equality. The work they did culminated in a paper published under Regnerus’s name, and Regnerus is the name most associated with its bogusness, but it was Wilcox who led the effort to raise the money (some of which he kept), helped direct the study, and weaseled it into the journal by serving as a peer reviewer for its publication. (Two subsequent studies reanalyzed the Wilcox/Regnerus data, and thoroughly debunked its results — here and here; you can get the full story by following the links in this post.)

Although they failed in their quest to affect the Supreme Court, their work lives on in the very small, evil minds of anti-gay fanatics around the world, who continuously cite the original paper. One of those men is Judge Scott Johansen, a juvenile court judge in Carbon County, Utah (the state’s seventh district), who has cited unspecified “research” to justify his decision to take a one-year-old baby from the home of Beckie Peirce and April Hoagland, a married lesbian couple who are the child’s foster parents. With the approval of the baby’s biological mother and child welfare authorities — who did the routine thorough investigation and vetting that all adoptive parents (including me) have endured — the two were moving ahead with plans to legally adopt the baby when Johansen, a law graduate of the Mormon Brigham Young University, handed down his decision. The decision is set to take effect next Tuesday (November 17). His decision is not public, but he told the couple his own research showed it was better for children to be raised by a heterosexual couple. We don’t need to ask what research he has in mind.

Legal efforts continue, and officials — including the governor of Utah — have asked the judge to reconsider.

If your research was used like this, what would you do?

So, this is the point of all the work Wilcox and Regnerus did. We must assume they wanted exactly this decision, but on a much larger scale; they wanted same-sex couples to be denied the right to adopt children, and children to be denied the right to have married gay and lesbian parents. They would apparently rather see a one-year-old child who has spent three months with a loving family ripped from that family rather than face the fate of having lesbian parents.

If I’m wrong, and I would be especially happy to be wrong in this case, then Wilcox and Regnerus should be the first experts lining up to convince Judge Johansen that he’s making a mistake, that the actual well-being of the child, and the civil rights of its parents, should come before slavish devotion to religious dogma. In fact, speaking up right now might actually do some good.

Wilcox has gone out of his way to sing the praises of the “deep normative and religious commitments to marriage and to raising children within marriage” in Utah specifically. But he doesn’t comment on this aspect of Utah’s holiness — the deep commitment that has led the Mormon church to announce a wretched, hateful policy under which it will not bless or baptize the children of gay and lesbian couples unless they denounce their parents.

Now might be a good time for Wilcox’s sham Institute for Family Studies — which has yet to ever use the words “lesbian,” “gay,” or “homosexual” on its web pages — to break its silence and take a stand for children and family well-being.

I’ll be holding my breath.

Regnerus has the callous disregard for poor single mothers and their children, but doesn’t get policy

Taking questions onstage at the World Congress of Families, Mark Regnerus reportedly was asked whether he would support cutting welfare benefits to single mothers to encourage them to marry. The question is not on the video, but part of his answer is. I transcribe it below, but here’s the tape:

Regnerus said:

… lay of the land in terms of the attempts to stimulate marriage, how difficult that is – your policy, which is sort of associated with the idea of the marriage penalty for people who are on social welfare and not married to the father of their children. It’s possible, right? It’s one of those things where – my skepticism tends to – how do people act in certain situations – what should we expect of people. In that situation, it creates this entity where we have to identify who’s in the household, how often are they in the household, the relationship, etcetera. Your policy is not a bad one in terms of moving people toward marriage – we want to do that. Whether it will work – who knows? And, I’m totally not a policy analyst so I’m going to stop right there.

His trademark verbal incoherence makes this hard to follow, but it appears his only concern with such a policy is the problem of household-member surveillance. His callous disregard for poor single mothers is apparent — he’s not concerned with the principle of coercing people into marriage, or even with violation of rights associated with verifying household comings and goings. He’s just not sure it’s feasible.

The weird thing is he’s got it backwards. If you want to deny benefits to single mothers, why do you care if they have a boyfriend in the house? That’s the problem the government has when it tries to only give benefits to single mothers — when its afraid they’re concealing a man who is supporting them.

The policy of denying benefits to people who are single — but giving benefits to people who are married — is what Brad Wilcox and Marco Rubio are trying to accomplish with their convoluted and badly calibrated child tax credit reform (see this description by Matt Bruenig). Maybe Regnerus wants to do that, but also find a way to punish single mothers who are carrying on outside of marriage, but it’s hard to see how that’s part of the policy.

But then again, I’m not a policy analyst so I’m going to stop right there. If you think I’m not getting it, please enlighten me.

How random error and dirty data made Regnerus even wronger than we thought

The news is nothing I have to say, but the new article, available in prepublication form, by Simon Cheng and Brian Powell, which methodically flays the infamous Regnerus paper, leaving nothing but a wisp of foul-smelling ill-will trailing from its remains. (The paper is here, where it is paywalled; feel free to email me. Follow the whole story at the Regnerus tag.)

Cheng and Powell reanalyzed the Regnerus data, the New Family Structures Survey (NFSS), and see what would happen if Regnerus had done the data processing and analysis right. This goes beyond the logical flaws and biases that were inherent in the study design (discussed here), to find the coding and analysis errors. A few examples:

• So much for “raised by…” 24 of the 236 people coded as having a “lesbian mother” or “gay father” — because they reported one of their parents ever had a same-sex romantic relationship (I’ll use LM and GF here to refer to Regnerus’s codes, not reality) — never lived with the parent in question! We had known previously that a large number (138) had never lived with the partner in the romantic relationship, but this is a whole nother level of wrong. A total of 58 of the LM/GF sample were reported to have lived with the supposedly gay or lesbian parent for a single year or less.
• Bad cases. The most ridiculous is the “25 year-old man who reports that his father had a romantic relationship with another man, but also reports that he (the respondent) was 7-feet 8-inches tall, weighed 88 pounds, was married 8 times and had 8 children.” Another reported being arrested for the first time at age 1. Real data collectors scrutinize cases like that and throw them out or find a way to fix them. (Really good data collectors stop the person — or the data entry — right when they say something outrageous, to see if they’re sure.)
• Illogical cases. There are a lot of these, including the person who reported “having always lived alone but also claims to have always lived with mother, father, and two grandparents.”

Then there are a series of bad analysis and modeling decisions Regnerus made, such as coding people who refused to answer a question as 0 instead of missing, or using the wrong kind of statistical model for the particular outcome.

When they get done with it, there really is no reliable, significant negative outcome associated with having lived any appreciable amount of time with a parent who might have been gay or lesbian. There’s more to it, but I don’t want to discourage you from reading the paper.

Random error, correlated outcome

Some of the “misclassified or uncertain” cases also report serious problems in adulthood, exhibiting higher-than-average rates of suicidality, depression, drinking to get drunk, and having a poor relationship with their mothers. So those could be people whose difficult lives rendered them unable to complete the life history calendar correctly. But there is also a chance that, like the 7’8″ guy, there are people just answering some of the question at random. These were people taking the survey alone on a computer, with no supervision, and getting paid to be part of the sample. Clicking at random is not out of the question (one person only took 10 minutes to complete the lengthy survey).

Contrary to what you might assume, clicking at random does not always produce random results. I’ll illustrate this with an example. First, here’s another tidbit from Regnerus, which might fit this point. Speaking to some Franciscans in 2014, Regnerus (just after 9:00 of this video) was going on about sexual fluidity as a condition of modernity, when he dropped in this fact from the NFSS:

Despite comprising a mere 1.3 percent of the population, respondents in the NFSS [New Family Structures Survey] who said that their mothers have had a same-sex sexual relationship made up 15 [50?] percent of all the asexual identifiers in the NFSS. So, 15 [50?] percent of them come from 1.3 percent of the population. [I originally transcribed those as 50%, but on second listening I think he said 15%, but I can’t be sure.]

His raised eyebrow here is to indicate the deeply depraved nature of lesbian mothers — maybe it’s genetic, or maybe it’s child abuse — but… he lets the numbers speak for themselves. Lesbian mothers, asexual children.

Here’s how this works. If you are trying to find people in two rare conditions — for example, those with lesbian mothers and those who are asexual — and a small portion of your sample answers questions at random, not only will you have a relatively large number of false positives on your conditions, your rare conditions will also falsely appear to be correlated.

I’m sure I didn’t discover this, and I don’t have a mathematical proof for it, but it’s logical. And I confirmed it with an experiment, as follows.

Say you have a sample of 1000 people, and you’re studying two conditions that occur on average in one out of every 500 cases. I’ll call them “climbing Mt. Everest” and “going to the moon.” In your thousand cases, you will on average have 2 people who did each thing. The chances that the same person did both are probably really low (you do the maths). But, if just 1% of your sample — 10 people — answer those two yes/no questions at random, look out!

I created this scenario using Excel’s random-number function. With 990 people answering truthfully — that is, given a 1/500 chance of saying yes to each question — and 10 answering them both randomly, this is what I got: 6 people who had climbed Mt. Everest, and 8 people who had gone to the moon. But shockingly, there were 4 people who had done both — that is 67% of the mountain climbers and 50% of the moonshotters. You can’t know, from looking at the data, but I can, that all of the people who went on both adventures were in the tiny group of random answerers.

Here are the 1000 cases in random order, with green showing Everest-only cases, blue showing moon-only cases, and red showing positive answers to both questions. And here’s the statistic: in the total sample — 990 serious survey takers and 10 jokers — the correlation between climbing Mt. Everest and going to the moon is .53! Click to enlarge:

Maybe Regnerus is just an incredibly, irresponsibly bad researcher, who didn’t conduct the simplest data checks before rushing to publish his paper. Or maybe he is a diabolical genius, and he realized that high random error rates in both his rare independent variable and his rare dependent variables would produce results showing poor outcomes for children of gays and lesbians.

In the Cheng and Powell paper, their various procedures and corrections wipe out many of Regenerus’s negative outcomes for GF/LM respondents before they tackle the “misclassified or uncertain” cases. But when they do that, some of the last coefficients to fall to non-significance are indeed relatively rare: having suicidal thoughts (7%), not being “entirely heterosexual” (15%), having had an STI (11%), and having had forced sex (13%). Each of these becomes non-significant when the bad cases are controlled in the Cheng and Powell models. I haven’t worked out a proof (ever), but I reckon that the rarer they are, the more likely they are to be correlated with the rare independent variable (LM/GF) if some people are answering at random — which they apparently were.

Anyway, the Cheng and Powell paper speaks for itself. But I find it interesting that unchecked data error produces false positive (that is, negative) outcomes for marginal groups. Look out!

Regnerus responds

Photo by carnagenyc from Creative Commons.

Note: Corrected May 3 to reflect that these documents are about post-tenure review, not promotion to full professor. The blogger regrets the error, and thanks the tipster.

The news, reported in The Daily Texan, with documents retrieved via public records request, is that, in the face of conflicting views about Mark Regnerus’s promotion to the rank of full professor post-tenure review,  UT’s Dean of Liberal Arts, Randy Diehl, commissioned a report on the scandal by sociologist Marc Musick. The report is an excellent review and summary of the affair, and provides ample evidence for declining the promotion. And for the rest of us, it had the beneficial effect of flushing out Regnerus, who wrote his most detailed response yet to the accusations against him — a response he may or may not have realized would become public. (The new documents are linked in the Texan article; for my coverage, you can start here for a review with links.)

It’s difficult to try to draw a line, as Musick does, apparently at the dean’s request, between ethical misconduct and bad research. It’s really where the two are combined that Regnerus causes trouble. More on the promotion issue later.

Musick was entirely correct when he wrote:

Based on these [media] appearances and his [court] testimony, it is self-evident that Professor Regnerus has used his research in the debate over same-sex marriage in direct contradiction to the statements he made in the NFSS article and response to commentaries. When combined with clear evidence that he colluded with politically-motivated organizations prior to the publication of the study, it leads to the appearance that the post-study behavior was an extension of the political work that was happening prior to the study. In light of all of this activity, it appears that the statements he made in the article could certainly be seen as misleading at best and an outright fabrication of his intentions at worst.

This is the heart of the ethics side of the complaint: his bad research was part of a covertly-organized political effort, and he lied about it to cover that up. Regnerus simply asserts this isn’t true, but to believe his self-serving description of his own intentions is to be made a fool of. It’s just not plausible that,

I did not intend to utilize the results for any political or legal purpose, and stated so when I completed work on the manuscript in late February 2012. My interests, from the outset of participation in this project up through December 2012, lay squarely in the social science question that gave rise to the study.

Only God can truly see into the unlit depths of Regnerus’s heart — but the rest of us can be pretty sure he’s lying based on his actions.

Regnerus claims that as he became immersed in the subject he grew convinced that same-sex marriage is a bad policy, and began “to worry about esteeming the systematic severance of children from their biological origins.” But he was part of the “coalition” (his word!) against gay marriage from before the study was even fielded. His email to Brad Wilcox, prior to conducting the study:

I would like, at some point, to get more feedback from Luis [Tellez] and Maggie [Gallagher] about the ‘boundaries’ around this project, not just costs but also their optimal timelines (for the coalition meeting, the data collection, etc.), and their hopes for what emerges from this project, including the early report we discussed in DC.

What pure interest in “the social science question” involves planning an “early report” with the leading activist against gay marriage, Maggie Gallagher?

Lots of research is as poor quality as Regnerus’s. It’s in combination with the rotten ethics that we see the more serious problem — it’s how the research fits in with his diabolical political plans and his reprehensible moral views. That is, the research was not just bad, it was bad in a purposeful direction. That’s not discernible from a reading of the single, (not really) peer-reviewed article.

Cause and effect

The issue of causality is described in the report as one of methods, but I think it’s really an ethical issue.

Regnerus has been having this both ways from the beginning, and it highlights the challenge of (and for) public intellectuals who speak to multiple audiences. In the original paper he wrote, “I would be remiss to claim causation here.” So that is his cover (and he quotes again here). But in presentations to friendly audiences he is much less guarded. As I reported earlier, in a talk he gave at Catholic University:

He first described in some detail the “standard set of controls” he used to test the relationship between having a father or mother who ever (reportedly) had a same-sex romantic relationship and his many negative outcome variables. And then he proceeded to present bivariate relationships as if they were the results of those tests. He didn’t say they were adjusted [for the controls], but everyone thought the results he showed were controlling for everything. For example, to gasps from the crowd, he revealed that 17 percent of “intact bio family” kids had ever received welfare growing up, compared with 70 percent for those whose mother (reportedly) ever had a same-sex romantic relationship. If you don’t realize that this is mostly just a comparison between stable married-couple families and single-mother families, that might seem like a shockingly large effect.

The causal story at that talk was hammered home in two other ways. First, he presented the results as evidence of a “reduced kinship theory,” under which parents care less about their children the less biologically related they are. Second, he said his “best guess” about why he found worse outcomes for children of women who ever had a lesbian relationship than for those whose fathers ever had a gay relationship was that the former group spent more time with their mothers’ lesbian partners. Both of these descriptions are based on a causal interpretation of his findings.

Anyway, on to the political machinations.

Regnerus lies about Brad Wilcox’s lies

Regnerus complains that Musick brings up the “tired ethical complaint” about Brad Wilcox, who, Regnerus claims, “held an honorific position with the Witherspoon Institute.” And he offers this: “In my interactions with him, he never acted with authority, only advice suggestive of his own opinion.” Regnerus no-doubt thinks he is using a clever legalism, as if Wilcox did not have literal signing authority for dispersing Witherspoon funds and therefore did not offer anything beyond “his own opinion.” But it’s clearly wrong.

Just to be clear how ridiculous this hair-splitting is, here is the email exchange that they no-doubt both now regret (which Musick quoted as well). Regnerus writing, Wilcox answering in bold caps:

Tell me if any of these aren’t correct.

1. We want to run this project through UT’s PRC. I’m presuming 10% overhead is acceptable to Witherspoon. YES
2. We want a broad coalition comprising several scholars from across the spectrum of opinions… [goes on to discuss individuals]. YES
3. We want to “repeat” in some ways the DC consultation with the group outlined in #2. … [details of how the planning document will be crafted] YES
4. This document would in turn be used to approach several research organizations for the purpose of acquiring bids for the data collection project. YES

Did I understand that correctly?

And per your instruction, I should think of this as a planning grant, with somewhere on par of $30-$40k if needed. YES

Regnerus may now say, indignantly, “Professor Wilcox did not — and does not — speak on behalf of Mr. Tellez,” the Witherspoon president, but he certainly understood Wilcox as speaking for Witherspoon in that exchange. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he ask Tellez these organizational questions directly?

In a 2012 blog post on the now-defunct (and deleted, but preserved) Family Scholars blog hosted by the Institute for American Values, Wilcox wrote that he never served as an “officer” of Witherspoon. He was, on the Witherspoon website as preserved by the Internet Archive, listed as “director” of the institute’s Program on Marriage, Family, and Democracy from late 2008 to mid-2010. That program still exists on the website, incidentally, but it no longer mentions any director — Wilcox is the only director ever listed in the Internet Archive pages. As of last month, Wilcox’s CV doesn’t mention this position.* (I don’t understand the purpose of an honorific position if you’re not proud of it.)

And then there’s the Wilcox email where he refers to the study as “our dataset.”

Campaign, or coincidence?

Regnerus tells a story of coincidences. For example, Tellez may have (in his words) wanted the research done “before major decisions of the Supreme Court,” but that had nothing to do with Regnerus’s goals, which were to finish his report by January 2012 “for no other reason than I wished to finish it and move on to other projects.” At the time the research was funded, Regnerus says, he did not share Tellez’s political goals. Coincidentally, they both happened to want to project completed in the same time frame. And then, in another coincidence, Regnerus later came around to joining in Tellez’s opinion that same-sex marriage must be stopped. Is this a more plausible story than the simpler one in which Tellez, Wilcox, and Regnerus were all on the same page all along? The evidence for the conspiracy is pretty robust, considering Regnerus, Wilcox, David Blankenhorn, Maggie Gallagher and other anti-gay marriage activists planned the research at a meeting in Washington hosted and paid for by the Heritage Foundation. On the other hand, the evidence for the coincidence is Regnerus’s solemn word. This conspiracy is a theory kind of like evolution is a theory — it’s the only plausible explanation for a known series of events.

In the coincidence story, the survey was delayed, so Regnerus would have to keep working on it beyond January 2012. However, he nevertheless just “decided to give a journal submission a shot” in November 2011 anyway. Not that he was aiming for Tellez’s Supreme Court deadline. Just because. So he “contacted [Social Science Research editor] Professor James Wright to ask if he’d consider reviewing a manuscript on a study like this one,” before the data were even collected. You social scientists out there — have you ever asked a peer-reviewed journal editor if they would consider publishing something “like” what you were working on before you even had the data collected?

In fact, this “give a journal submission a shot” idea came from Wilcox, who in the email mentioned above suggested sending it to SSR because Wright was (the late) “Steve Nock’s good friend” and “also likes Paul Amato,” whom they had secured as a consultant. In the end, Wright would use both Wilcox and Amato as reviewers.

The coincidences Regnerus speaks of also include the meeting he had in August 2011 in Denver with Wilcox, Glenn Stanton from Focus on the Family, and Scott Stanley, after which (he wrote to Tellez at the time), “we feel like we have a decent plan moving forward” for “public/media relations for the NFSS project.” In his response to Mucisk, Regnerus now writes, “Denver was a convenient stop on the way back to Austin from the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Las Vegas, and I took the opportunity to meet socially with a few peers.” That includes Stanton, who “lived about an hour’s drive of where we met.” (I’m not sure why you need a “convenient stop” from Las Vegas to Austin, which is a short nonstop flight.)

See, no campaign. Sure, he also arranged for the study to be shared with “some conservative outlets” before publication, attended a “short function hosted by the Heritage Foundation” about the study just before it was published, and “another such function … at the offices of the Institute for American Values.” But he doesn’t even know, “frankly,” “how such groups came to be apprised of the impending study release.”

Then, after describing, literally, how he colluded with politically-motivated organizations prior to the publication of the study, Regnerus concludes, “This hardly merits the accusation that I ‘colluded with politically-motivated organizations prior to the publication of the study.'”

And oh, sure, on closer inspection (he actually says, “I see now…”) he did use the “media training” document that Heritage provided, which he has falsely testified he “largely ignored,” in his own promotion of the study. In his post on Patheos.com (here), he wrote:

Q: So are gay parents worse than traditional parents?

A: The study is not about parenting per se. There are no doubt excellent gay parents and terrible straight parents. The study is, among other things, about outcome differences between young adults raised in households in which a parent had a same-sex relationship and those raised by their own parents in intact families.

The Heritage talking points (from Musick’s report) included this:

Whether gay parents are worse than traditional parents.The study is not about parenting. There are no doubt excellent gay parents and terrible traditional parents. The study is about outcome difference between young adults raised in a same-sex household and those raised by their own parent in intact families.

Well, he says now, “I very likely did use a few lines” from the document. “So be it.” Nevertheless, “to suggest I received extensive media training — and leaned on it in a comprehensive campaign — is out of touch with my lived reality.” (Who’s a phenomenologist now?) It’s tempting, after reading his response, to assume that whatever Regnerus specifically denies is exactly true.

On the labeling issue

I noticed something new in reviewing material for this post. If you’ve made it this far, bear with me here on this detail.

The infamous Regnerus article was published with the title, “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships?” In the article he referred to the adult children who reported that their mother ever had a same-sex romantic relationship as “LM” for “lesbian mother,” along with “GF” for “gay father.” In the rebuttal to his critics, published later in 2012, he acknowledged these were the wrong terms:

Concern about the use of the acronyms LM (lesbian mother) and GF (gay father) in the original study is arguably the most reasonable criticism. In hindsight, I wish I would have labeled LMs and GFs as MLRs and FGRs, that is, respondents who report a maternal (or mother’s) lesbian relationship, and respondents who report a paternal (or father’s) gay relationship. While in the original study’s description of the LM and GF categories I carefully and accurately detailed what respondents fit the LM and GF categories, I recognize that the acronyms LM and GF are prone to conflate sexual orientation, which the NFSS did not measure, with same-sex relationship behavior, which it did measure.

But he insisted this was just a question of confusing terms, not an attempt to actually label these parents according to their sexual orientation. He added:

The original study, indeed the entire data collection effort, was always focused on the respondents’ awareness of parental same-sex relationship behavior rather than their own assessment of parental sexual orientation, which may have differed from how their parent would describe it.

This came up in the Mucisk report, and Regnerus responded:

As noted in Professor Musick’s assessment, the problem of locating an optimal acronym here is something to which I have already confessed … It remains a significant regret. And yet the distinction between a woman’s same-sex relationship (to use Professor Musick’s acronym) and a woman’s “lesbian” relationship (as I assert by using the MLR acronym) is no doubt a narrow one. As ought to be obvious, I use the term “lesbian” as an adjective here, not a noun [emphasis added]. It describes a relationship, not a self-identity.

But did Regnerus really intend to use “lesbian” as an adjective? No, he did not. I know this because, in the email exchange between Social Science Research editor James Wright and Brad Wilcox (in which Wilcox lied by omission and which Wright later misrepresented), we can see the original title of the article Regnerus submitted, which is not the title subsequently published. The original title was, “How different are the adult children of lesbian mothers and gay fathers? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.” Clearly, Regnerus’s original intention was to describe the parents of the people he surveyed as “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” — using nouns referring to the people, not adjectives referring to their romantic relationships. It was not a matter of confusion; it was an attempt to create a false impression of the study’s implications.

Promoting Regnerus

In our department, promotion to full professor requires “an exemplary record in research, teaching, and service” which has made the candidate “widely regarded as a scholar.” However, these terms are not defined, and no quantities of research or citations are included. These things are left vague, and much rides on the interpretation of the experts consulted, who are considered the best judges of academic merit. So, what if a professor brings scandal and disrepute to himself and the institution? What if he expresses views that are morally reprehensible? What if he lies about his work, including in his work?

I don’t envy my colleagues in the excellent department of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin (about this case — I do envy them in other ways). Their directory lists 39 professors, only one of whom is disgraceful in those ways. It’s not a simple matter, denying a tenured professor a promotion (even though this is only post-tenure review, it’s the promotion issue that looms). It’s a personnel decision governed by laws, and it’s wrapped up in the tenure system, which is important for academic freedom.

In the case of Regnerus I’ve already expressed my opinion.

Honest social scientists do not combine these activities: (1) secret meetings with partisan activist groups to raise money and set political agendas for their research; and, (2) omitting mention of those associations later. If Regnerus, Wilcox, Allen, and Price, had included acknowledgements in their publications that described these associations, then they would be just like anyone else who does research on subjects on which they have expressed opinions publicly: potentially legitimate but subject to closer scrutiny (which should include editors not including people from the same group as reviewers). Failure to disclose this in the publication process is dishonesty.

Based on that — more than based on the morally reprehensible views — I would vote against Regnerus’s promotion. But I am not privy to the process at UT, to their reviews and other materials, and I haven’t been asked for my opinion or advice.

* Is it unethical to take academic activities off our academic CV if they make you look bad? It emerged in one of the gay marriage trials that Brigham Young economist Joseph Price, testifying as an expert against gay marriage, took a grant from the Witherspoon Institute off his CV. In this case I don’t see that Wilcox ever had Witherspoon on his CV, but he was listed as a director on their website.

Bogus versus extremely low-quality, Sullins edition

Photo by CTBTO from Flickr Creative Commons (modified)

Calling a study “peer-reviewed” gives it at least some legitimacy. And if a finding is confirmed by “many peer-reviewed studies,” that’s even better. So the proliferation of bogus journals publishing hundreds of thousands of “peer-reviewed” articles of extremely low quality is bad news both for the progress of science and for public discourse that relies on academic research.

Two weeks ago I briefly reviewed some articles published by D. Paul Sullins, the anti-gay professor at Catholic University, on the hazards of being raised by gay and lesbian parents. I called the journals, published by Science Domain International (SDI), “bogus,” but said you could make an argument for extremely low quality instead.

After that Sullins sent me an email with some boilerplate from the publisher in defense of the journals, and he accused me of having a conflict of interest because his conclusions contradict one of my published articles. After correctly pointing out that a sting operation by Science failed to entrap an SDI journal with a bogus paper about cancer research, he said:

SDI is a new and emerging publisher. … While I would not say SDI is yet in the top tier, and I don’t like their journal names much either [which mimic real journal titles], for the reasons listed above I submit that this publisher is far from ‘bogus.’

How far from bogus?

Since that post, the reviews on the third of Sullins’ papers have been published by Science Domain and its journal, the (non-) British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science. So we have some more information on which to judge.

The paper, “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-sex Parents: Difference by Definition,” was reviewed by three anonymous reviewers (from the USA, Brazil, Nigeria) and one identified as Paulo Verlaine Borges e Azevêdo, from Brazil. I summarize them here.

Anonymous USA

This reviewer only suggested minor revisions (nothing in the “compulsory revision” section). These were the suggestions: Avoid the first person, clarify the race of study participants, discuss the results in more detail, don’t use the word “trivial,” add citations to several statements, grammar check.

Anonymous, Brazil

This review demanded compulsory revisions: Clarify the level of statistical significance used, explain acronyms, clarify use of “biological parents” when discussing same-sex parents. And some minor revisions: one typo, one font-size change, standardize number of decimal places.

Anonymous, Nigeria

This reviewer included compulsory revisions: mention instrument used in the abstract, clarify measures used in previous studies on children’s well-being, test all four hypotheses proposed (not just three), clarify use of instrument used, shorten the discussion. Minor revisions: check for typos.

Paulo Verlaine Borges e Azevêdo, Brazil

This reviewer requested reorganizing the text, like this:

Would be better to redistribute the lengths of results (lessened), discussion (up) and conclusion (down) sections. In many moments, in the Result section the author deal with I believe would be better located in the Discussion (e. eg., between lines 345 and 355). I suggest that the subsections of Results would be reviewed by author and parts that discuss the results be transferred to the Discussion section … Strengths and Limitations would be better located in the discussion section too.

A few additional minor text modifications were included in the marked up manuscript.

Round two

Upon revision, Sullins was subjected to a punishing second round of reviews.

This included an interesting if ultimately fruitless attempt by Anonymous Brazil to object to this somewhat nutty sentence by Sullins: “biological parentage uniquely and powerfully distinguishes child outcomes between children with opposite-sex parents and those with same-sex parents.” What he meant was, when he controlled for the biological relationship between children and their parents — since hetero parents are more likely to have any biological parentage (and they’re the only ones with two bio parents) — it statistically reduced the gap in children’s mental health between married hetero versus same-sex parents. Although the exchange was meaningless in the decision whether to publish, and Sullins didn’t change it, and the reviewer dropped the objection, and the editors just said “publish it,” you would have to say this was a moment of actual review.

OK then

That’s it. None of this touched on the obvious fatal flaws in the study — that Sullins combines children in all same-sex families into one category while breaking those currently with different-sex parents into different groups (step-parents, cohabitors, single parents, etc.) — and that he has no data on how long the children currently with same-sex couples have lived with them, or how they came to live with them. So it leaves us right where we started on the question of same-sex parenting “effects” on children.

Of course, lots of individual reviews are screwed up. So, is this journal bogus or merely extremely low quality? Do we have a way of identifying these so-bad-they’re-basically-bogus journals that is meaningful to the various audiences they are reaching?

This matters is because journalists, judges, researchers, and the concerned public would like some way to evaluate the veracity of scientific claims that bear on current social controversies, such as marriage equality and the rights of gay and lesbian parents.

Children in same-sex parent families, dead horse edition

Not that child well-being in different kinds of families isn’t a legitimate research topic, but this idea of proving same-sex parents are bad to whip up the right-wing religious base and influence court cases is really a shark jumping over a dead horse.

Without getting into all the possible detail and angles, here are some comments on the new research published by D. Paul Sullins, which claims to show negative outcomes for children with same-sex parents. Fortunately, I believe the legal efficacy of this kind of well-being witch-hunt research evaporated with Anthony Kennedy’s Windsor decision. Nevertheless, the gay-parents-are-bad-for-kids research community is still attempting to cause harm, and they still have big backers, so it’s important to respond to their work.

Research integrity

Below I will comment a little on the merits of the new studies, but first a look at the publication process and venues. As in the case of the Regnerus affair, in which Brad Wilcox, Mark Regnerus, and their backers conspired to manufacture mainstream legitimacy, Sullins is attempting to create the image of legitimate research, which can then be cited by advocates to the public and in court cases.

Although he has in the past published in legitimate journals (CV here), Sullins’ work now appears to have veered into the netherworld of scam open access journals (which, of course, does not include all open-access journals). Maybe this is just the decline of his career, but it seems they think a new round of desperate “peer-reviewed” publishing will somehow help with the impending legal door-slam against marriage inequality, so they’re rushing into these journals.

Sullins has three new articles about the mental health of children with same-sex parents. The first, I think, is “Bias in Recruited Sample Research on Children with Same-Sex Parents Using the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ).” This was published in the Journal of Scientific Research and Reports. The point of it is that same-sex parents who are asked to report about their children’s well-being exaggerate how well they’re doing.

The second paper is “Child Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Same-Sex Parent Families in the United States: Prevalence and Comorbidities.” It was published on January 21 in the British Journal of Medicine & Medical Research. It claims that children living with same-sex parents, surveyed in the National Health Interview Survey, are more likely to have ADHD than “natural” children of married couples.

The third — the one I call third because it doesn’t seem to have actually been published yet — is, “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-sex Parents: Difference by Definition,” in the British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science. It’s point is the same as the second, with slightly different variables. (The author’s preprint is here.) This is the one Mark Regnerus referred to in a post calling attention to Sullins’ work. (The legitimacy strategy is apparent in Regnerus naming the fancy-sounding journal in the opening sentence of his post.)

What makes these scam journals? The first clue is that two of them have “British” in the name, despite not being British in any way (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They are all published by Science Domain, which is listed on “Beall’s List” of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers.” They are not published by academic societies, they are not indexed by major academic journal databases, they publish thousands of papers with little or no peer review (at the expense of the authors), and they recruit authors, editors, and reviewers through worldwide spam campaigns that sweep up shady pseudo-scholars.

For the first two, which have been published, Science Domain documents the review process. The first paper, “Bias in Recruited Sample…,” first had to overcome Reviewer 1, Friday Okwaraji, a medical lecturer at the University of Nigeria, who recommended correcting a single typo. Reviewer 2, identified as “anonymous/Brazil,” apparently read the paper, suggesting several style changes and moving some sentences, and expressing misgivings about the whole point. After revisions, the editor considered the two reviews carefully, and then wrote to the managing editor, “Please accept the paper, it is okay.” It was submitted November 18, 2014 and accepted December 17, 2014.

The second paper, “Child ADHD…,” also shows its peer review process. Reviewer 1 was Renata Marques de Oliveira at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2012 she was listed as a masters student in psychiatric nursing, and is now an RN. This is the entirety of her review of Sullins’ paper:

OK, then.

The second review is by Rejani Thudalikunnil Gopalan, described as a faculty member at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, or maybe Gujarat Forensic Sciences University, Gujarat, India. She was recently spotted drumming up submissions for a special issue of the scammy American Journal of Applied Psychology (“What? We didn’t say it was the same journal as the Journal of Applied Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association!”). The journal AJAP is published by the Science Publishing Group (see Beall’s List), but I couldn’t investigate further because their website happens to be down.

Unlike Oliveira, Gopalan seems to have read the paper, and offered a few superficial questions and suggestions – not quite the very worst review from a legitimate journal that I have ever read. After a cursory reply, the editor responded (in full): “The authors have addressed all reviewers’ concerns in a satisfactory way. This is an outstanding paper worthy of publication in BJMMR.” It was accepted two weeks after submission.

I don’t want to imply that three journals are illegitimate just because they are run for profit by low-status academics from developing countries. But looking at the evidence so far I think it’s fair to call these journals bogus. However, I wouldn’t argue too much if you wanted instead to say they are merely of the very lowest quality.

Why does a guy at a real university, with tenure, publish three articles in two months at a paper mill like Science Domain? I fear our dear Dr. Sullins has fallen out of love with the scientific establishment. Anyways.

Content

You might say we should just ignore these papers because of their provenance, but they’re out there. Plus, I want people to take my totally unreviewed blog posts seriously, so I should take these at least a little seriously. Fortunately, I can write them off based on simple, complete objections.

Combining the 1997-2013 National Health Interview Surveys, about 200,000 children, Sullins gets 512 children who are living with a same-sex couple (about 16% married, he says). In both the second and third papers, he compares these children to those living with married, biological or adoptive parents who are of different sexes. The basic problem here is obvious, and was apparent in the infamous Regnerus paper as well: same-sex couples, regardless of their history — married, divorced, never-married, just-married, married before the kid was born, just got together yesterday when the kid was 15, and so on — are all combined in one undifferentiated category. This just can’t show you the “effect” of same-sex parenting. (When Regnerus says this research supports the ” basic narrative … that children who grow up with a married mother and father fare best at face value,” he’s slipping in “grow up with,” though he knows the study doesn’t have the information necessary to make that claim.)

However, if Sullins did the data manipulations right — which I cannot judge because I don’t know the data, little detail is provided, and the reviewers have no expertise with it either — there is a simple descriptive finding here that is interesting, if unsurprising: children living with same-sex parents over the period 1997-2013, the vast majority of whom are not married, and presumably did not conceive or adopt the child in their relationship, have more emotional problems and ADHD than children living with their married, biological parents. We have to be smart enough to consider that — if it’s true — without falling into accepting the claim that such problems are the result of same-sex parenting, because that has not been established. Of course, this supports an argument for marriage equality, but it’s also just an empirical pattern worth understanding. If Sullins, Regnerus, and their ilk weren’t so hellbent on opposing homosexuality they could actually provide useful information that might be part of a knowledge base we use to improve children’s lives.

Sullins’ judgment is no doubt clouded by his overarching religious objection to homosexuality, which, he believes, like abortion and contraception,

contravene the natural operation of the body in order to conform human sexuality to the ideals of modernity… By severing the link between sex and children, both [abortion and homosexuality] increase privatization, diminish the social intentionality and form of the sexual union, and undermine the unitive good and the transcendent goal of marriage.

So for him it’s already settled — long before he extruded these papers (and Regnerus has expressed similar views). Apparently they think they just need a few bogus publications to bring the public along.

The persistence of gender differences, Catholic furor edition

The Pope’s convention of male moral pontificators is convening to discuss family matters. One of the most important questions, as Ross Douthat has described at great length, is how to strike the right balance between laxity and rigorism on the question of divorce, to maximize Church membership by keeping divorced people (and their children) on the rolls while sending the minimum of those members to hell for adultery after they remarry.

(This is a great project for a sociologist interested in simulations.)

Divorce is a leading issue, but homosexuality looms. In yesterday’s New York Times, Frank Bruni writes about the American Catholic Church leadership’s obsession with homosexuality:

…Catholic officials here have elected to focus on this one issue and on a given group of people: gays and lesbians. Their moralizing is selective, bigoted and very sad. It’s also self-defeating, because it’s souring many American Catholics, a majority of whom approve of same-sex marriage, and because the workers who’ve been exiled were often exemplars of charity, mercy and other virtues as central to Catholicism as any guidelines for sex. But their hearts didn’t matter. It was all about their loins. Will the church ever get away from that?

As Bruni reports, employees at Catholic institutions are still being fired for acknowledging their homosexuality (the starting point, incidentally, of the new movie Love Is Strange, for the couple played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina).

Bruni may speak for the majority of American Catholics when he condemns the Church’s witch-hunt. But as the synod approached, a group speaking for the academic right wing of the anti-gay movement within American Christianity beseeched the Holy Father to use the occasion to “express timeless truths about marriage,” which are that cohabitation, divorce, homosexuality, and pornography are wrong.

(Aside: Academics will appreciate the funny requests for money for themselves and their movement in the letter. They want money for “cross-discipline, longitudinal research on the role of pornography and ‘no fault’ divorce in the marriage crisis,” and they want “mandatory courses [for seminarians] covering social science evidence on the benefits of marriage, threats to marriage, and the consequences of divorce and cohabitation to children and society.”)

The letter calls for opening a new front in the war on modern marriage law, using the language of religious freedom to prevent divorce (as they have urged with regard to marriage equality):

Many do not know that religious freedom is routinely violated by divorce judges who ignore or demean the views of a spouse who seeks to save a marriage, keep the children in a religious school, or prevent an abandoning spouse from exposing the children to an unmarried sexual partner.

In other words, they want to argue — in court — that divorced spouses who have new partners are violating the religious freedom of their ex-spouses. (By this logic, I guess, I could argue that them even making this argument violates my religious freedom not to live in a society where someone makes this argument.)

They would like the Pope to:

Support efforts to preserve what is right and just in existing marriage laws, to resist any changes to those laws that would further weaken the institution, and to restore legal provisions that protect marriage as a conjugal union of one man and one woman, entered into with an openness to the gift of children, and lived faithfully and permanently as the foundation of the natural family.

Regnerus himself (follow the Regnerus tag for background) is taking the long view in his new role as movement intellectual. And the logic he uses helps explain Bruni’s puzzle over the Church’s homosexuality obsession. In an interview on a Christian radio station last month, Regnerus said there are a lot of objectionable marriage laws outside the same-sex marriage debate. He went on:

It’s important for us to not sort of just get caught up in the big kahuna around same-sex marriage, and to remember, as we’ve seen with the abortion debate, incremental change, legally, can occur even after all hope seems lost. But there’s also sort of – nobody’s holding us back from creating a marriage culture in, say, the Catholic Church or broader evangelicalism. We hold ourselves back, right? I tend to think the way things are rolling at the moment, it’s not just as if same-sex marriage fell out of the sky, and was on our plate. I mean, it was paved, right? The road to there was paved in part by all sorts of poor laws around opposite-sex marriage, right? And the giving away of what we might call the sort of functional definition of marriage, visions of complementarity, you know? We have bought, hook, line, and sinker, the idea that essentially men and women are interchangeable in our marriages. And it’s hard to get away from that, but I think we’re going to have to. So in some ways we want to fashion a counter-cultural movement regardless of what the states signal.

The way I see the way he sees it, the mission is to protect and restore gender differentiation itself. That agenda, not just old-fashioned patriarchal views, underlies the anti-homosexual obsession, the opposition to marriage equality and single motherhood, and the effort to protect the male religious hierarchy.

Different genders

I object to this agenda personally on moral grounds, naturally. But my scientific opinion is that the concern is misplaced. In some broad ways, of course, gender differences have eroded — for example, as women have gained political rights and access to gainful employment. And on the rare occasions when they choose to, men can even be nurses, teachers, and stay-at-home parents. You might call all that a convergence of gender roles. But gender differentiation is alive and well.

In some respects the gender binary is resurgent after a brief surge of androgyny in popular culture around 1970 (which Jo Paoletti traces in the fascinating forthcoming book, Sex and Unisex). A visit to the Sociological Images Pinterest board on pointlessly gendered products helps reinforce this point — there are even gendered kids’ Bibles:

Or consider the relative frequency of the phrases “toys for boys” and “toys for girls” in American English as a fraction of references to “toys for children,” from Google ngrams:

In fact, it seems to me that gender difference is proliferating. But it’s not just the binary difference.

One of the benefits of the high visibility of the marriage rights movement has been its exposure of gender variance. Far from a convergence around a single gender, as the traditionalist Christians fear — or the elimination of gender — instead I think we have a growing diversity of gender perspectives and identities. The very narrow interpretation of this is that “men and women are interchangeable.” The reality is that no one is.