Anyone want to help me tear this to bits?

[velvetpage]

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20061028/25636.htm

Here are the things I noticed:

1) The study doesn't recognize bisexuality at all. This is a major flaw, since there are at least half a dozen people on my friends list who identify as bi and are married/in heterosexual long-term relationships. Behaviour is only one indication of sexual preference, and it is not necessarily the definitive one.

2) There's an underlying equivalence here between "social" and "environmental" that needs to be challenged. Environmental factors could include physical things like pollution that are not controllable on an individual level but could have an effect (to the best of my knowledge, that has not been ruled out as a scientific factor - someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.)

3) The conclusion - "Taken together, the study’s findings suggest that intact parents bearing multiple children and living in rural areas increase the probability of heterosexual pairings in their children." Really. I thought it showed a connection - but I didn't see any evidence of causality. It seems to me that the more insular and religious your family life, the less likely you are to be open about your sexuality if it doesn't match expected norms, leading to fewer homosexual marriages. Thus, social expectations increase repression rather than decreasing homosexuality.

All in all, I dislike the tone that parents can avoid that most horrible of outcomes, a homosexual child, if they just obey the teachings of their church regarding their own marriages. Of course, it's what I would expect from this source, but still - it grates.

Comments

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. What a flawed study. I'll have to take more of a look at this after I've worked on my homework. First off, there's the classic mistake of correlation implying casuality. It does not. If that were so, I would conclude that the number of transexual hooker ads in Philly's City Paper predicted the stock market. I actually did a quickie spreadsheet on this and there is a correlation, but I have a hard time seeing a causality. Just because you have two trends moving in phase does not mean that one is dependent on the other. In my suitably ludicris example here, my guess is that the stock market drives the hooker ads because well heeled pervs have more money during a bull market. Environment is a tougher nut to crack still. First off, how do you know someone is homosexual? They have to tell you, volunteer for your study, or your previous work has to have proved telepathy and produced 100% reliable telepaths. So your sample is self selected. Even if you did a longitudinal study of several thousand people from all over a nation, following them from childhood through adulthood, you rely on the fact that your study group has told your their orientation. This is problematic because people in the closet are often in there for good reason. The other thing going on with sexuality in urban areas is the strength of weak ties, referring to Granovetter's seminal paper on social networks. Strong ties are your family and long time friends. Weak ties are your co-workers and other less familiar people. Strong tied networks tend to share the same information and thus do not provide transformative information. Weak ties, tie people of different classes and backgrounds together through their day to day interactions and their heterogenity means that diverse types of information are shared. While Granovetter studied this with regard to socioeconomic standing, I bet this obtains in matters of sexuality. If you know you're attracted to members of the same sex in a small town, chances are your perception of these feelings will stay rooted in the teachings of your church and the expectations of your family. If these institutions teach that homosexuality is negative, then you will struggle with your feelings and probably keep them hidden. If you live in a city, your weak ties will stand a better chance of putting you in touch with others who have the same feelings. Maybe you'd come to the conclusion that you're bi, maybe you'll find a partner just like and come to want to get married. But in any case, your understandings will undergo a transformation.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

A study stating what I summed up in my third point - nice. I believe it probably holds true in almost all situations. Small towns and rural communities tend to be more religious and conservative than cities, and this is the reason - a higher ratio of strong to weak ties in the rural communities.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

I don't know that anyone has studied social network theory and how it might relate to sexuality. However, there's been a lot of work on social networks in information seeking behavior. I don't know that you could construct a good study on sexual orientation given that your sample is necessarily self selected from the general population. This is something I have to ask about in my stats class. I do think it would be useful to examine how avowed homosexuals and bisexuals found about their wider communities and whether it necessitated a move from their place of birth to a city, specific city at that. This is probably a big reason why Gays as a demographic tends to have high levels of education. I'm betting that a lot of homosexual young people only really come to terms with their sexuality on college both because of the open learning environment and because they have gotten away from their original place and come into contact with people just like them. At any rate, I cam up with plenty of anecdotal evidence, but stastical data is going to be very flawed. I think it would be very instructive to conduct studies of of how people who migrate from a rural to an urban environment change in general. One question of many would concern sexual orientation.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Just a quick clarification: When I use the term Gay, I mean homosexuals who are open and not in the closet. There's plenty of people who are homosexual, but are not open about their sexuality. So, the hyopthesis here is that young people who are homosexual have a better chance of coming to terms with their sexuality in college than not. I'm betting this holds true even of urbanites. In my experience growing up in a very working class section of LA, homosexuality was not accepted and , depending on your peer group, could even be life threatening if your orientation was found out. So, the gays were banished Wilshire-ward to West Hollywood, Santa Monica and so on. The funny thing was that gay outsiders who moved into my area were just accepted as a type of foreigner with strange habits. Working class urbanites can be just as insular and intolerant of other lifestyles as rural folk, especially during times of economic upheaval.