(Originally published in Bay Windows, January 22, 2008).
Dr. Blase Masini wants to spend time with your family—or at least with data about you. The developmental psychologist and head of the research department at Howard Brown Health Center, a leading LGBT health care organization in Chicago, has launched a nationwide study of LGBT parenting, and hopes more families will participate by completing his online survey. He’s not just an ivory-tower researcher, however: He’s also the gay father of two sons whom he adopted with his partner. This experience, coupled with his professional training, motivates his work. He explains, “My graduate study was in early childhood development. I’ve come to know through the textbook and firsthand experience what it takes to raise kids to be healthy. I am convinced that sexual orientation has nothing to do with it.”
Masini acknowledges the growing body of research on LGBT families, but believes more can be done. He wants to collect empirical data on the development of children in LGBT families so policy makers have better information when it comes to passing legislation. The best approach, he feels, is to do comparisons against existing national data sets of families in general—in this case, a National Survey of Children’s Health conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 2001, encompassing over 100,000 households. He’s asking many of the same questions as the CDC, and adding a few extra to get at the impact of homophobic discrimination and bullying. “My goal is to get a control group from the national sample, based on like households with the same sort of socioeconomic status and the same geographic area and the same number of children and the same race,” he says.
He will then look at how the family environment and the children’s development compares to national norms. While he intends to promote his study mostly through academic channels, he hopes to partner with someone who has a policy background and can help translate his numbers into something that could be distributed to politicians.
He admits this is only a pilot study, with certain limitations: “I’m not able to do a nationally representative sample of LGBT parents. I can already tell you [my sample] is largely white, well educated and higher income. Those are just the people that are accessing this online survey. It’s unavoidable right now.” Masini asserts he would still love to hear from people outside these groups, and says he would print hard copies of the survey and mail them to anyone who asked. He plans to use the results from this study, furthermore, in grant applications for funding to do “more face-to-face, more scientifically based research,” avoiding the biases of online-only questionnaires.
Masini also says most of his respondents are lesbians, followed by gay men. He has at least two transgender parents so far, although he hopes to get more. Colleagues at other institutions have told him anecdotally “there are a lot of families out there where one parent is a transgender male, and the other is a woman who then uses a donor,” but he says “I’m not hearing from them yet, and I’d love to.”
Despite the underrepresentation of parts of our community, Masini’s work is broader in some ways than many previous studies of LGBT families, which have focused almost exclusively on lesbian moms. “I’m really pushing the men because there is a fair amount of good research about children raised by lesbians. [That body of research] is very small, and it’s not adequate by any means — but there is not a single published scientific article on children raised by gay men. I’m at about 30 percent men, which I’m really happy with,” he says.
He wants to look at all segments of the community, but admits, “I can’t help it, I’m a little more passionate about the men. Male couples—I feel like we’re frowned upon a little bit more. I think there’s some myth about this maternal instinct, that it’s required for normal development [of one’s children]. My boys are 11 and five and seem to be fine. We adopted them at birth. That’s part of it. I’ve never seen anything like that in the scientific journals and I want to pursue that.”
So far, he seems to be on the right track. “I know I have more data on the development of children raised by gay men that probably anyone has ever had. I’d like to eventually start a longitudinal study where I would visit face-to-face with families of young children, ages maybe zero to four, and start following them as the children mature into adolescence,” he sayd.
Masini can look to the model of the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, the largest and longest-running study of lesbian families, which began in 1986. The researchers are now in the process of interviewing the 17-year-old children of the original subjects, after publishing studies of the families at four previous points in their lives. “That’s a tall order,” Masini recognizes, “but that’s what needs to be done. That’s what will show that our children are just fine.”
You can take the survey online through May by visiting the Howard Brown Web site, www.howardbrown.org. Scroll down to the orange “Howard Brown Current Surveys” box and select “LGBT Parenting.”