After a week of learning how to find truthful and relative research, my Family Relation class found out just how much irrelevant research is credited as relevant evidence for argumentative topics.
One of the first things we learned about using a source, claiming it to have valid information about an issue, is to question its credibility, or in other words to question the origin of the source. The source must come from an entity of authority, of legitimacy, or it will only be a personal opinion of no true relevance. Therefore, one’s authority is heavily dependent on education, experience, and time currency. This applies to a single person or even an entire organization.
The readers must know which kind of audience these authorities are targeting, preferably the sources are from scholars who are specialized in the topic and are addressing other scholars. Thus, no summaries, reviews, or simplified conclusions are used, rather the complete data offers a greater weight to arguments. They also usually come with many citations of other sources used to back up the conclusions of the entity and provide proof of an unbiased opinion. Now, even if a source meets all these criteria and is considered relevant, it can still be questionable.
We took a look at the American Psychology Association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting by using Loren Marks’ “Same-sex Parenting and Children’s Outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association brief on Lesbian and gay Parenting”. This examination dissected the APA’s brief and revealed a concerning result, the APA’s conclusion that children of lesbian or gay parents are not disadvantaged relative to children of heterosexual parents, was not justifiable. The lack of comparison groups, or control groups, in the 59 researchers used to back up the APA’s research was unsettling. Not only that, the sample size of nearly all sources was too small to represent a larger group, in this case, people across the country.
However, the main issue with the APA’s claim was with the outcome. Its cited sources were not studying the outcome of the children of gay and lesbian parents compared to the children of heterosexual parents, rather they were mostly studying the outcomes and effects on the parents a whole lot more than on the children. A promising outcome for that research would have been the mental health of the children of homosexual parents, the children’s social skills and development, the children's marriage success later in life, and how they are treated by others. In the end, even the research of a highly credited association turned out to be questionable. Consequently, this begs the question that if this can happen to one entity of authority then could it happen to others as well?
In our class, we compared social studies with the traditional scientific method of studies. Since both are closely related because of the manner they have in collecting relevant data, we discussed their differences for a time. One of the major things to be taken into account is that human beings and their behavior are more complex than other areas of scientific inquiry because no one can observe or so easily identify the thoughts of the subjects. It creates many variables that are hard to see and analyze and consequently cannot be studied and further researched. There is also another major read block, the many ethical problems or controversies for carrying out experiments on people, especially children.
One of my main takeaways from this week’s class was learning how to take into consideration the statistical power of any research I may use in the future. Statistical power means that the research had strong enough evidence to prove that their research is relevant, over a 95% certainty.