Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NCE Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
It is confusing and disorienting when a supposedly reputable study makes one claim and another reputable study makes the exact opposite claim. It seems more than ever experts on either side of an issue can make statistics say whatever they want.
Well, today, We're joined by a man who spent 20 years deep in the field of sociological research while also teaching new generations how to conduct and assess research well and ultimately to honestly follow the data. Paul Sullins is a retired research professor of sociology at Catholic University of America. He now devotes himself full time to research in his role as senior research associate at the Ruth Institute. And he's going to help us to be better prepared to ask the right questions when we're looking at studies and what happens when we don't. Paul Sullins, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
Glad to be with you today.
Okay, over the expanse of your career in and around research, what changes have you seen?
Well, when I started 30 years ago, the field that I work in, which is generally sociology, psychology, family studies, it was ideologically polarized, but there was a strong pro-family, pro-family. Nature voice. But today, it has become, with few exceptions, completely dominated by theories that would want to rewrite the natural basis of the family and of human society. It's very difficult to raise a voice against that almost universal consensus. The American Sociological Association and the American Psychological Association both, for example, have resolutions or standards that explicitly preclude any research considered what they call heteronormative, that it holds up man-woman marriage or biological parents as normal for human society.
It's not that they don't agree with those views, it's that they won't even allow them to be expressed.
So that would be the biggest change I think that I've seen. This flies in the face of good research, right? Where you're supposed to let the conclusion kind of appear. Are they lying? Are they manipulating the data?
Are they misled by their own confirmation bias? Where is all this coming from? Yeah, I would say the latter. It's easy to vilify people who disagree with us, but I don't think that they have some malicious intent, at least not for the most part. But they truly believe an ideology that leads to what I call propaganda research.
Lots of very weak studies that put forward views of human society or human persons, human relationships that don't have a lot of empirical support, but they're strongly believed by those who put them forward. And so, in that sense, social science research has really become more like a religion than like a science today. When you talk about propaganda research studies, can you give us some examples? What are some of the worst? offenders.
When you study the outcomes for children with same-sex parents compared to with biological parents, I like to use the term man-woman parents. There's a whole host of studies that purport to show that children with same-sex parents come out just the same, that there's no difference between those two. But all of those studies that show that are extremely weak. Reviews of the studies, for example, have found that the average sample size is less than 50. And the results that they come up with often are not fully explained, often are not even supported by the analysis that they do, but they're driven by a very strong ideological agenda.
It's similar in several other fields. Why is it important that we challenge some of these weaker studies? Because the prophets of our society are these ivory tower academics. Today's abstruse academic theory becomes tomorrow's social policy, and it affects our lives. In many, many ways.
Some people call this the law of unintended consequences. For example, in the early 1970s, social scientists believed that if two persons were in a difficult marriage, they should divorce. They would both be happier and somehow their children would adapt and would be better off with not having to live with two unhappy adults.
Well, we know now that that's emphatically untrue. And the policy that has led to has been a disaster. We now have a regime of widespread, easy divorce that leads to tremendous social harm and personal unhappiness. It's thrown millions of women into poverty as they become single parents. It's harmed the natural development of millions of children as they've had to grow up with multiple family transitions and step parents that we find are really not good for children in lots of ways.
So that theory, that failure of theory, became a huge social problem. I could go on and on with other examples, but that gets you the idea.
So, what happens for Christians that come across a study result that doesn't back up the things that they believe? What do you suggest that they do?
Well, everybody comes to research. Every scientist comes to research with their own point of view and their own perspective. I come with a Christian Catholic perspective. But that doesn't mean that that's going to bias my research. It means that I'm going to ask questions and I might question conclusions that seem to contradict the implications of my faith.
But that doesn't mean that I'm going to necessarily shortchange the research process. That's going to actually supercharge the research process because I believe firmly that no assertion of faith that's based on the Word of God is going to contradict the empirical findings of natural science.
Now, As John Henry Newman, a Catholic saint, said, Faith and science will never contradict one another, but they will often seem to contradict one another. And so that puts forth the task for us to examine both our faith and our scientific conclusions more closely to the point where we come to some way of reconciling those two. And I've done both. That's part of the scientific process. We get researchers with all different points of view, and they come together and they go back and forth on different questions.
You know, the scripture says iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. And seeing things differently is at the root of science. And so we should be in there and we should mix it up reasonably and listen and give and take with every rational point of view that we meet in science and in philosophy. The problem today is people of faith aren't allowed to get into the conversation, that it's excluded on. what the people on the other side would say are ethical Concerns, but really are ideological concerns.
And so somehow we have to be able to speak our peace and raise our voice, not to be biased, not to try and dominate science by our religion, but to be able to express the reason that underlies what we believe. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. This is just one of the many ways NC Family works to educate and inform citizens about issues that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our vision is to create a state and nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished. For more information about NC Family and how you can partner with us in pursuit of this vision, visit our website at ncfamily.org and be sure to sign up to receive our email updates, action alerts, and Family North Carolina magazine.
You can also follow us on social media at NC Family Policy. That's at NC Family Policy. How difficult is it to review? You keep talking about these studies and taking a closer review. Is this a big, extensive project, or is this something that anybody that has a working knowledge of research could do?
I think the answer would be both. It depends.
Some studies are extremely technical, and so they need technical review. But anybody with common sense can look at a scientific study and ask a few questions that will really help them to understand it. First of all, what is the size of the sample? If the size of the sample is less than 200 or 300, that study doesn't have much power to say much of anything scientifically. And then it should ask: does the study disagree with itself?
A good methodology is one that's going to question its own assertions in the midst of a study. Probably the thing that makes empirical science, which is where I work, strongest. Wrong is that we have a whole set of established procedures. to quantify what we don't know. to be very clear about the limitations of what we're saying.
And so we talk about margins of error or margins of uncertainty or the weak or the strong power of our findings. Or a good study will say, other people may come to this other conclusion or see other implications. And so it'll address those and give you some reasons why that researcher didn't do that.
So for layman's terms, that would be like a transparency, right? This is what we are good at. This is what we're not.
Okay, sorry, go ahead, continue. That's a good way to put it. Another thing you can do is to look at any scientific study is going to have a section near the end called limitations. And it's going to tell you what that researcher recognizes as the problems and the limitations of the study. And so often if you look at those, it's like reading the cautions on a medicine bottle.
And you look at all of the side effects. And after looking at those, sometimes you say, well, I'm not sure I want to take this medicine.
Well, it's the same way with research. You look at all the qualifications and the limitations, and you say, Well, wow, maybe I don't want to put too much strength in this particular research. The other thing that's important to do is to never put too much strength in any one research study. It's very rare that you're going to have one study that's going to establish firmly some particular finding or point of view. It is an incremental process of many studies that kind of triangulate on a particular conclusion.
Do you see any hope? Are we going to get some integrity back in some of the social science research? We do have integrity now in some of the social science, but it's stifled, it's suppressed. And the best place to find integrity are in, counterintuitively, would be in the lower prestige journals nowadays, where you have independent editors who make objective decisions. They're not driven by ideology.
And they're willing to publish and consider articles or theories that go against the field and that challenge things from many different points of view. And I'm sorry to say, but most of that Open, free scientific discourse happens outside of the United States. The United States is dominated by large research conglomerates, I guess I'd call them, you know, that publish hundreds of journals and make billions of dollars a year, but have been captured by woke ideology in many cases. And so they don't let certain things be said. But if you have a journal that's published even in Eastern Europe or in Asia or increasingly in Africa or South America, you're much more likely to find an open, robust policy debate and an openness to hearing religious points of view.
Very interesting.
Well, we are about out of time. Reverend Sullens, where can our listeners follow your work? Maybe find some specific projects and resources that you have mentioned to us today. If you want the whole treatment, you can look at my website, which is just sullens.com. HTML, but you could just Google Donald Sullins and it'll take you to that.
But then a better place, really, would be collections of my research on the website of the Ruth Institute, which is ruthinstitute.org. And there you can find, I have some research on abortion and some on same-sex parenting and some on sexual orientation issues. Basically, you know, the hot button issues where I'm trying to defend or Further explore the teachings of the faith, of the Christian faith, in a secular environment. All right. Paul Solins, thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
Thank you, Tracy. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org.
And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
