Media Slant Favors 'Older Brother Effect' Study Over Conflicting Research
by Mary Rettig and Jenni Parker
August 18, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Grove City College's associate professor of psychology and Fellow for Psychology and Public Policy says media bias became evident this year when one study of sibling relationships and how they may be linked to homosexuality was trumpeted while another study with conflicting results was ignored.
A study by Canadian psychologist Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario has been all over the news in the last several months, according to Grove City College's Dr. Warren P. Throckmorton. He believes the reason for the ubiquity of these reports is that Bogaert, whose findings were recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, apparently claims to have found evidence that homosexuality may be biologically determined.
But while news of Bogaert's study has been reported, analyzed, and discussed in the media around the globe, Throckmorton says another study that was written up in 2001 has been largely ignored. The investigation to which he refers was conducted by researchers Peter Bearman and Hannah Bruckner and focused on opposite-sex twins and adolescent same-sex attractions.
The findings from this study strongly support the significance of social influences in determining sexual orientation. The results, however, did not support the hormone transfer model that Bogaert's study favored.
"The study by Bearman and Bruckner looked at a very large group of adolescents and asked questions about their same-sex attraction, if they had ever been attracted to the same sex," Throckmorton says, "and the only real pattern they found was with males who had opposite sex -- or female -- twins, fraternal twins." What the researchers found, he notes, was that "those males were twice as likely to have same-sex attraction."
This was a significant finding, the associate professor observes. "What the doctors, Bearman and Bruckner, concluded was that less gendered socialization during childhood and adolescence was associated with experiencing same-sex attraction in adolescents," he explains.
Throckmorton feels the two researchers' investigation, which was published in 2002 in the American Journal of Sociology, was largely ignored by the press. And no wonder, he suggests, remarking that these findings fly in the face of traditional mainstream media wisdom - which, he says, is likely why it was dismissed.
Both the Bogaert and the Bearman and Bruckner research projects are critically important, even with their conflicting results, Throckmorton insists. Both are needed, he says, because human sexuality is very complex and socialization factors should not be ignored.
As for the biased media, Throckmorton says his main concern in all this is that, with the way the mainstream outlets report so much about genetic disposition to various things, personal responsibility and accountability could get lost in the shuffle. The danger there, he says, is that people may become predisposed to blame a lot of their problems on genetics rather than owning up to their own free-will choices.
