The New Family Structures Study (abbreviated NFSS) is a sociological study of LGBT parenting conducted by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin. The study surveyed over 15,000 Americans of ages 18 to 39. The first research article based on data from the study was published in July 2012 in Social Science Research, and concluded that people who had had a parent who had been in a same-gender relationship were at a greater risk of several adverse outcomes, including "being on public assistance, being unemployed, and having poorer educational attainment."
The study was met with considerable criticism from many academics and scholarly organizations. Most notably, only two children in the study had actually lived with homosexually partnered parents for their entire childhoods. Many of the non-heterosexual parents were in previous heterosexual marriages, and had then gone on to be in a same-sex relationship at some point. Regnerus removed the effects of divorce, infidelity, single parenthood from his heterosexual control group, but not from the gay parent group. Thus, negative outcomes could be attributed to family disruption and divorce, as opposed to homosexual parenting. More importantly, large studies of twins separated at birth and raised in different environments found that they grew up to be just as similar as those raised together, and large adoption studies found that adopted children correlated with their biological parents for genetic reasons, not their adoptive parents. Thus, parents tend to have limited environmental effects on their children's behavior, and negative outcomes very likely correlate with shared genes between parents and children. A 2015 reanalysis raised serious questions about the validity of the study, suggesting misclassification of families, inconsistency in answers suggesting mischief, and evidence many respondents did not live with their non-heterosexual parents. When these cases were excluded the differences largely vanished.
Methodology
The NFSS survey of over 15,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 was conducted by Knowledge Networks on behalf of the University of Texas at Austin. Its stated purpose was to determine differences in outcomes among young adults raised by same-sex parents compared to young adults raised by "their married biological parents, those raised with a step-parent, and those raised in homes with two adoptive parents." The survey collected data from young adults who had grown up in one of five unconventional families, namely, those where a parent had had a same-sex romantic relationship, biologically unrelated parents adopted the respondent, parents were unmarried but co-habiting, biological mother had a romantic relationship with another man, and biological mother did not have a romantic relationship with another man. The survey also collected data from young adults from conventional families as a control group.
Findings
The study compared various types of families, and found that subjects who perceived their parents as having engaged in a same-sex relationship were more likely to have been sexually abused by their parents. When compared with those who grew up in (still) intact, biological mother–father families, the subjects who reported that their mother had had a same-sex relationship and did not make a similar report about their father look different on outcomes regarding including education, depression, employment status, and marijuana use.
Regnerus states although the findings reported may be explicable in part by a variety of forces uniquely problematic for child development in lesbian and gay families—including a lack of social support for parents, stress exposure resulting from persistent stigma, and modest or absent legal security for their parental and romantic relationship statuses—the empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go.
The term LM is used for subjects who stated that their mother had had a same-sex romantic relationship but did not make a similar statement about their father. The term GF is used for subjects that stated that their father had had a same-sex romantic relationship. The term IBF is used for subjects whose biological families were intact from birth through the time of the survey.
Table 2
(The following results are mean scores on select dichotomous outcome variables.)
The results are read in the percentage of children from each family structure who responded positively to each question. For example, for the variable "currently married" 43% of respondents from intact bio-family answered yes, whereas 36% of those in the LM category answered yes, and 35% of those in the GF category answered yes.