Science might have found why some people are gay.

[Angrboda]

Reading a critique of Paul Cameron's research on homosexuality concerning the 1983 ISIS survey (ISIS being the former name of Cameron's group, The Family Research Institute) :

Cameron's claim that, "having a homosexual parent(s) appears to increase the risk of incest with a parent by a factor of about 50," based on a survey of several thousand people is an inference drawn from a sub-sample consisting of a mere 17 respondents.

Thus, even if the numbers had come from a representative sample, the only valid conclusion that the Cameron group could have drawn is that the true proportion of adults who report having a homosexual parent and being an incest victim is somewhere between -4% (effectively, zero) and +62%. This is such a wide margin of error as to be meaningless. Moreover, because this confidence interval includes zero, the Cameron group cannot legitimately conclude that the true number of children of homosexual parents (in the 8 municipalities sampled) who were victims of parental incest was actually different from zero.

The critique also criticizes the validity of the questionnaire used in the survey (citing issues such as respondent fatigue, overly complex questions, and so on). I think the gem in the survey however comes from a question in which respondents were asked why they thought they had developed the sexual orientation they had, they were given a list of 44 options, including the response, "I failed at heterosexuality."


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