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 The purpose of this blog post is to judge the flawed research of the APA not to judge gay/lesbian relationships and parents. This past week in my Family relations class we were taking a look at the Americans Psychology Associations brief on lesbian and gay parenting submitted to the Supreme Court in the Obergefell case where the court was tasked with deciding whether American Citizens had a constitutional right to marry someone of the same sex. The brief used 59 studies to support their claim that children of lesbian or gay parents are at no disadvantage compared to children of married heterosexual parents. The reason this document is so important is because it was used by the supreme court when looking at legalizing gay marriage. In class we looked at Loren Marks Examination of APA Brief. This examined the research done by the APA and brought to light some of the flaws involved in their research. The APA brief claimed to be measuring the outcome of the children when in reality many of the cases they used measured actions of the parents. This causes an issue because they are using these studies to support a conclusion about outcomes, when the studies were actually examining parenting claiming to do one thing but actually doing something else. Furthermore, many of the research cases did not compare the outcomes of children of homosexual parents to children of heterosexual parents. This is another research flaw because in order to determine whether the children are at a disadvantage or not there needs to be a control group and a comparison group. In other research cases used they did use a comparison group, but the control group they used was single mothers. Again, the issue is they are not comparing what they claim to be. They found that children of homosexual parents were at no disadvantage compared to single mothers, but statistically children of single mothers are at a disadvantage compared to children of married heterosexual parents. This could lead to the assumption that children of homosexual parents are at a disadvantage, but without studies with appropriate control and comparison groups, we can’t know in what areas disadvantages may or may not exist. There were also issues with sample groups used in some studies. They used white gay men from one geographical area to represent all gay parents. There were no men used from other locations, cultures or races. In class we were discussing what outcomes would have been useful to observe in children. One of my thoughts was looking at their future marriages. It would be interesting to see the percentage of children with homosexual parents who end up in heterosexual marriages compared to the percentage of children with heterosexual parents. An important part of research is time. The best way to compare the two groups of children is to observe them throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood. That way you could look at different factors like criminal records, education, social life, and more over a period of years. I think the American Psychology Association would have a lot more success doing that brief now compared to back then simply because of the passage of time since same sex marriage became legal in every state. The amount of gay and lesbian couples have increased greatly and, more importantly, the amount of gay and lesbian couples raising children has increased. When the brief was written they used convenient samples, people who were somehow connected to the researchers or who chose to participate in the study. They didn’t pick randomly from the population. In addition, the population of gay lesbian parents was not that big at the time. It's hard to say what the results from the brief would be if the research studies it was based on contained proper sample and comparison groups that accurately reflected the population. I think the brief could be worth re-doing keeping the following important things in mind. Firstly, the researchers cannot be biased and skew the findings to fit their opinion. Secondly, there would need to be proper and diverse control and comparison groups, which would be a lot easier to get now. Thirdly, they would need to look at valuable outcomes actually related to the children and their development outcomes over a long period of time.