Family Relations Class Week #2

            During this week’s Family Relations class, we talked a lot about the study of families and how they are structured. As part of this we spend part of class talking about talking about the scientific method.

    The scientific method consists of six different steps. The first step is to ask a question. The second step is to perform research based on your question. Third, you make an hypothesis which is a proposed explanation or guess made using your observation and research. Fourth, you are to test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Fifth, while you perform the experiment, make observations on what is happening. Sixth, analyze the results and draw a conclusion from the experiment. After drawing a conclusion, and collecting all the data, make a presentation of the experiment and show your findings. The final step is to then do the experiment again. Some important things about performing your experiment is to know what your dependent variables are and what your independent variable is. Your independent variable is something that does not change based on another variable. The dependent is something that does change based on another variable. A good way to show the differences between the dependent variables and the independent variable is like a graph such as where x is the independent variable and y is the dependent variable because it changes according to x.

Outside of taking a close look at the scientific method we talked a lot about an article released in 2005 from the American Psychological Association labeled “Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting.” This article was made up of 59 different research reports that together come up with the conclusion that “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” What is interesting about many of these research studies is that the article has many questionable research findings. After studying the research article myself it seems that the American Psychological Association’s brief has some pretty significant design flaws, which make it difficult to be confident in many of the researcher's reported findings. In the article many of the studies have a lack of comparison groups in the experiments that were done. When the APA states that there are no significant differences between the outcomes for children parented by gay or lesbian parents, it is important that the studies also have comparison groups even though only about half of the studies actually interviewed or collected data from comparison groups. If the APA wants to state confidently that children with parents in same-sex relationships have the same outcomes as children in traditional families, they need to compare against traditional families such as those who still have a mom and a dad living in the house. It turns out that at least 11 of the studies compared gay/lesbian parents to single mothers. This is important to understand, because the data already shows that children from single-parent homes are usually at a great disadvantage to those with both parents in the home. There are several others as well. And these mistakes in research really limit the ability for the APA--or anyone else--to honestly say that they demonstrate no differences between the outcomes for these children and those of traditional families. In fact there are several problems dealing just with samples chosen to represent the greater group.

All in with this article that we studied in class it is apparent that it is hard to judge the truthfulness of this article if the proper steps are not taken during an experiment. When done incorrectly, there are two types of errors that can happen from this. The first is known as a type 1 error occurs if an investigator rejects a null hypothesis that is actually true in the population. A type two error occurs if the investigator fails to reject a null hypothesis that is actually false in the population.

These are just a few of the things that I learned in this past week’s class of Family Relations. If you have any questions I would love to hear them. If you would like to read the APA article for yourself I will leave a link for it below.


https://byui.instructure.com/courses/230984/files/105952538/preview

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