Abstract
The New Family Structures Study (NFSS) is a social-science data-collection project that fielded a survey to a large, random sample of American young adults (ages 18–39) who were raised in different types of family arrangements. In this debut article of the NFSS, I compare how the young-adult children of a parent who has had a same-sex romantic relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional, and relational outcome variables when compared with six other family-of-origin types. The results reveal numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married (heterosexual) biological parents. The results are typically robust in multivariate contexts as well, suggesting far greater diversity in lesbian-parent household experiences than convenience-sample studies of lesbian families have revealed. The NFSS proves to be an illuminating, versatile dataset that can assist family scholars in understanding the long reach of family structure and transitions.
Publicado en Social Science Research.
Received 1 February 2012. Revised 29 February 2012. Accepted 12 March 2012. Available online 10 June 2012.
Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, a research associate of the university's Population Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. His areas of research are sexual behavior and family formation. He's the author of two books (2007 and 2011) on the sexual behavior of teenagers and young adults.
His new research on the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships is published in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research, and is available here. It's understandably drawn a great deal of scrutiny, and so he wrote a follow-up response to critics and made the data publicly available to other scholars. A dialogue about the study's findings appeared in Slate and is available here. Mark has also written several short essays about data collection on same-sex parenting, polling about same-sex marriage, new evidence from Canada, and thoughtful assertions about how same-sex marriage may shape the wider mating market.
Prior to this work, he primarily focused on heterosexual behavior and the dynamics of contemporary mating markets, a summary piece of which was published in the journal Society and is located here as well as in his book entitled Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. His Slate article on the low cost of sex was the ninth-most downloaded Slate article of 2011.
http://www.markregnerus.com
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