"Some criticism of Dr. Regnerus was well deserved; for example, he included in the same category the children of stable same-sex couples and children whose parents’ marriage dissolved after a gay affair. And it is understandable that he is still gun-shy (he refused to be interviewed for this column). But even if he won’t talk about his research, we should. It raises important questions about family structure, and — just as interesting — asks whether religious beliefs can shape scholarship.

Dr. Regnerus’s critics have made much of the conservative institutions, the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation, that financed his study. But it’s actually pretty easy to ignore sponsors, once their check has been cashed. It is harder to ignore one’s deepest convictions. Although he does not discuss it now, Dr. Regnerus has a long history as an outspoken Christian who once said his faith and his scholarship were intertwined. So it is fair to ask what he meant."

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/controversial-gay-parenting-study-is-severely-flawed-journals-audit-finds/30255

Because of how the paper was written, Sherkat said, it would have been easy to miss Regnerus’s explanation of who qualified as “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers.” If a reviewer were to skip ahead to the statistics in the table, it would be understandable, he said, to assume that the children described there were, in fact, raised by a gay or lesbian couple for a significant portion of their childhoods.

In reality, only two respondents lived with a lesbian couple for their entire childhoods, and most did not live with lesbian or gay parents for long periods, if at all.

The information about how parents are labeled is in the paper. Regnerus writes that he chose those labels for “the sake of brevity and to avoid entanglement in interminable debates about fixed or fluid orientations.” Sherkat, however, called the presentation of the data “extremely misleading.” Writes Sherkat: “Reviewers uniformly downplayed or ignored the fact that the study did not examine children of identifiably gay and lesbian parents, and none of the reviewers noticed that the marketing-research data were inappropriate for a top-tier social-scientific journal.”

He also had harsh words for an accompanying paper in the same issue by Loren D. Marks, an associate professor of family, child, and consumer sciences at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Marks wrote a review of papers that had been published on the children of same-sex parents, taking the authors of those papers to task for using “small convenience samples” that are not generalizable, among other failings.

Sherkat writes that the Marks paper is “a lowbrow meta-analysis of studies” that was “inappropriate for a journal that publishes original quantitative research.” Sherkat, in an interview, said that Marks didn’t perform a true meta-analysis of the studies and instead simply wrote summaries of the results. Marks could not be reached for comment.