Saturday, December 31, 2011

Retro Post: Crappy Study Tells Us...Nothing

In case you missed it, "researchers" Dr. Stanton Jones and Dr. Mark Yarhouse recently completed a study that examined individuals in Reorientation Therapy and concluded that it is possible for homosexuals to change their orientation.  Granted, only the synopsis of the study has been released, but the problems, oh the problems with this study...



I don't think I even need to point out the flaw in assuming those enrolled in Reorientation Therapy are in any way an acceptable representation of the homosexual population.

Jones and Yarhouse wanted to track only first year enrollees in the Reorientation Program to eliminate incidences in which participants were misrepresenting or misremembering their initial homosexual attraction.  Unfortunately, they couldn't find enough, so they also accepted second and third year enrollees.  Rather than keep these populations separate, they combined them.  The problem with adding second and third year enrollees is that it does not track the process from gay to straight and allows for the misremembering of those later participants.

A quarter of the participants in the study dropped out during the study...and were only tangentially mentioned.  The assumption is that a dropout equals a failure, but Jones and Yarhouse said that there were enough people that dropped out because they were "cured" to make this statistically insignificant.  Do you believe that?  I don't.

Jones and Yarhouse relied on interviews and psychological assessments of homosexual attraction, not an observation of physiological responses.  In other words what little scientific basis there was for their study, was flawed.

They called bullshit on their own study: We cannot be absolutely certain of perfect representativeness, since no scientific evidence exists for describing the parameters of such representativeness.

And then called unbullshit: Still, we are confident that our participant pool is a good snapshot of those seeking help from Exodus (the name of the Reorientation Program)

They did not detail how they selected study participants, which is a HUGE red flag.

Some of their data has been called into question for being flat out wrong, such as the median age of study participants.

They called bullshit on their own study again: It would appear, then, that while change away from homosexual orientation is related to change toward heterosexual orientation, the two are not identical processes. The subjects appear to more easily decrease homosexual attraction than they increase heterosexual attraction.

Jones and Yarhouse wanted to account for participants that had some degree of heterosexuality heading into the study (being bisexual) because this would not dictate a change.  To do so, they classified a subset of the participants as "Truly Gay."  How did they do this?  No one knows!

Perhaps the full study will right some of these misconceptions, but based on the synopsis, that seems unlikely.

No comments:

Post a Comment