Comments on: Bearman and Bruckner: There is no fraternal birth order effect

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 02:25:00 +0000

Sorry. Thought you meant occurance of effect, not effect size.

When you’ve had the effect size peer reviewed, please let us know the method used as my (VERY limited) understanding of effect size seems to recall that the same numerical result can be either very low or very high depending on the method.

Timothy

By: Throckmorton

Throckmorton — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:48:00 +0000

Those are separate issues. The estimate of numbers of men that may owe sexual orientation to birth order is an estimate from Blanchard and cannot be taken as gospel since it is an estimate.

The effect size of the studies are statistical estimates of the variance accounted for by the relationship between the variables. These effect sizes are quite small but are important in that they allow us to look at one of what are probably many factors that may predict sexual orientation. I probably should not sound so certain about these effect sizes as yet. I have been talking to Anthony Bogaert about this some and he agrees that the effect sizes are quite small. He did not calculate an effect size for the recent study but my colleague Gary Welton did and he came up with 1%. We are documenting all of this and will run it by Bogaert and others as well as peer review before we say much more.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:35:00 +0000

“The birth order effect only predicts about .25 – 5%, depending on the sample and question asked.”

OK, I’m going by memory here, but I’m pretty sure you said earlier that it predict 1/7 and I think that I read that the this was an early projection and that closer evidence said 28%. I’m thinking that came from “Born Gay” but I may have my source incorrect.

Timothy

By: Throckmorton

Throckmorton — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:48:00 +0000

The X chromosome guys don’t seem embarrassed, nor did Bogaert. Of course, the whole thing is multifactoral. This is actually my point.

By: grantdale

grantdale — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:25:00 +0000

As I’m the oldest child, only son and did not display gender non-conformity you’ll have to keep looking. Obviously 🙂

[And that pathway is like soooo yesterday. More common now — if we go on ages — is attraction(12)->identity(14-15)->behaviour(16-17). Basically mirroring their straight peers, and why the age of coming out has fallen in recent years even though the other ages have not. I think this is in Savin-Williams.]

Now… you’re not about to embarrass yourself by doing only unifactorial calcs I hope…. ???

“What causes one to feel cold?”

“Well after extensive literature search we found that the wind speed only accounts for 5-15% of feeling cold. The weight of your jumper can only account for what???”