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[–] Fact_Checking_Alien 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Some problems with excerpts:

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_cameron_survey.html

Although the Cameron group has claimed that theirs was a "national" sample and have repeatedly used their data to make generalizations about the entire population, the initial sampling frame consisted only of 7 municipalities: Bennett (NE), Denver (CO), Los Angeles (CA), Louisville (KY), Omaha (NE), Rochester (NY), and Washington (DC). Data from an eighth city (Dallas, TX) were added later.

It's not representative.

They reported compliance rates of 43.5% (which they later corrected to 47.5%) for their initial, 7-municipality sample, and 57.7% for the Dallas sample. [...] Combining the Dallas data with the 1983 survey data yields an overall response rate across the 8 municipalities of approximately 23%.

He lied about the response rate.

In a simple random sample of 17, the margin of error due to sampling (with a confidence level of 99%) would be plus-or-minus 33 percentage points. [...] Thus, even if the numbers had come from a representative sample, the only valid conclusion that the Cameron group could have drawn is that the true proportion of adults who report having a homosexual parent and being an incest victim is somewhere between -4% (effectively, zero) and +62%.

His 1996 "incest" paper only took 17 respondents from the 1983-84 paper.

Throughout their reports, the Cameron group described the questionnaire as anonymous and reported that it was returned in a sealed envelope. But in a 1989 paper they reported that "postquestionnaire inquiry with selected respondents indicated that many homosexuals did not count persons contacted in an orgy or restroom type setting as 'partners'" (Cameron et al., 1989, p. 1175). For that last statement to be true, the researchers had to know which respondents to select for the post-questionnaire inquiry in order to reach "many homosexuals" who had participated in orgies or sex in restrooms (there were too few such individuals to have been detected simply through a small number of randomly targeted follow-up interviews).

He lied about it being anonymous.

Contrary to this well-established norm, Paul Cameron publicly disclosed the survey's goals and his own political agenda in the local newspaper of at least one surveyed city (Omaha) while data collection was in process.

He published his goals beforehand.

It's a long list of "what not to do" for sociological research. Included are contemporary citations about survey methods and sampling, which author Cameron violated extensively to contrive his results.