Social science was never going to save marriage’s male-female infrastructure. I never presumed it could or would. What it can do—and that’s what I will always love about it—is reveal what is going on. It has a difficult time laying blame or taking credit, because causality is always challenging to discern. I just wish the charged atmosphere could begin to sustain a healthy and fair debate. Not just yet, it seems.

Now that the Supreme Court’s oral arguments are behind us, and the justices have already privately cast their votes about the future (and the history) of marriage, perhaps it’s possible that the social science of marriage, sexuality, and child outcomes can catch its breath. Better yet, perhaps it can operate without the pressure-cooker of politically acceptable narratives.

But after three years, and two separate inquisitions by my own university, I’ve come to conclude that “the beatings will continue until morale improves,” as the saying goes. Or in my case, until I capitulate and admit I was wrong. I’m not above admitting mistakes, but neither am I prone to the sort of reeducation that is being pursued.

And so it is that a Washington Post blog recently covered the release of a study that re-analyzes the data I collected and described back in 2012 in my pair of studies of the adult children of parents who have had same-sex relationships, continuing a contest over the meaning of the New Family Structures Study (NFSS) that’s nearing three years in length now. Social science has become a spectator sport.

In the spirit of (continued) full disclosure, I was even a blind peer reviewer of an earlier version of this study. I didn’t sign off on what appears in print, but I felt—as a scientist—that alternative analyses at least deserve a hearing, for the sake of science.

To their credit, the authors helpfully pointed out a handful of cases that were questionable—respondents whose unlikely answers to other questions (like height, weight, etc.) suggest they weren’t being honest survey-takers. Such a critique is certainly fair and welcome; it’s part of the long-term process of cleaning and clarification in any dataset of substantial size. And removing those questionable cases actually strengthened my original analytic conclusions—and the authors say so: “. . . these adjustments have minimal effect on the outcomes . . . these corrections actually increase the number of significant differences . . .”

However, Professors Simon Cheng and Brian Powell do far more than this, and that’s where my appreciation ends—and the recognition of a historical pattern in the conduct of social science research begins. They attempt to plant doubt in readers’ minds with claims that my study’s methods “arguably are not entirely consistent with the general practices of the field,” which is a longwinded, overqualified way of saying others might have analyzed the data differently, given that people are different. And while I welcome the documentation and removal of a handful of odd cases, it’s a very different thing to suggest that the many respondents who report that they lived with their “lesbian mother” or “gay father” for a year or less are suspect cases, or “misclassified.” They are what they are, and I was very clear about how I classified respondents. Instead, the authors attempt to simplify social reality by problematizing particular combinations of household structures simply because they are complex. Of course, those households that are most stable are apt to fare better, as in fact they do. I’ve even said that under oath.

My study was a basic overview of the data collection project; it’s hard to deceive when you’re simply displaying the basic associations, a practice that Powell and Cheng do not continue. Hence readers are no longer able to visualize the magnitude of distinctions between the adult children of intact biological families and every other group of interest, because they elect not to disclose them.

“Controlling” Away How Social Reality Works

Powell and Cheng “control” their way to few or no significant differences between children of intact biological families and those who spend time in same-sex couple households. How? By sorting respondents according to the stability of their parents’ same-sex relationships, longevity of time in their household, by pooling together married moms and dads with those who eventually divorced or who shared joint custody throughout the respondent’s childhood, and by adding a control for childhood experience of poverty in addition to the income control I had already employed. (Seventy percent of households with a mother, her same-sex partner, and the respondent child received social welfare at some point.) But there are so few stable same-sex relationships in the data that, when analyzed in this way, the statistical power to detect real differences diminishes considerably. Powell and Cheng  themselves admit this, and the estimates of difference are hence no longer significant. That’s how one can go from a majority of 40 outcome variables displaying significant differences to just one or two. Had stability rather than instability been “endemic” to the same-sex relationships in the NFSS, I would have split the sample myself!

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