Soc/100 Assignment 1

Assignment 3: Investigate a Social Issue Draft
Jeffrey Fox
November 23, 2014
SOC 100 – Introduction to Sociology
Marilyn Sango-Jordan

I. Hypothesis
a. Children raised in same-sex families get better grades than children raised in traditional families.
II. Sociological Concept
a. Theory A: Children who are raised by same-sex families get better grades than that of traditional families
b. Theory B: Children who are raised by traditional families get better grades than of same-sex parents
III. Practical Implications
a. Societal beliefs that lesbian women or gay men cannot be competent parents. (Monte, May 2014).
b. Child school outcomes of same-sex parents and whether grades decline or increase if a child is raised by same-sex parents

Multiple factors have to be in place in order to perform a study like this and unfortunately not enough data is available to continue or even attempt to complete this study on my own, at this time. Studies suggest that “no differences in adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment, which included depressive symptoms, anxiety, and self-esteem, between offspring of same-sex couples and offspring of the comparison families headed by opposite-sex couples”. Wainright, J. L., Russell, S. T., & Patterson, C. J.

What I can say is that everything I’ve read shows positive results in favor of same-sex parents and to me it doesn’t really matter if children have same-sex parents or opposite-sex parents when it comes to getting good grades in school. When factoring in that same-sex parents cannot conceive together, these children arrive by varying routes and it’s difficult to say whether or not the sex of the parents, rather than the way the child was raised prior, can attribute to grades of the child. The numbers and statistics are just not available but I hope in the future I can revisit this study and determine whether or not my hypothesis can be proven or disproven. I have to sets of friends that are same-sex parents and their children are getting either straight A’s or A’s and B’s. My child, who was raised by to biological parents, is getting A’s, B’s, and C’s. So with my even smaller sampling of actual data, I found that, in this small case, it’s the child that performs the work to get the good grades and not so much the parents’ sexual orientation. Again this is a very small sampling of data and doesn’t prove or disprove my