Having Daughters Increases Parents’ Identification with the Republican Party

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20. This is not a "Republican" study. It was conducted by researchers from NYU and University of Kansas.

Given their credentials, I have no doubt the researchers were acting in good faith and using the best statistical and analytical tools available to them.

This is just one study, based on 20 year old data, because only the 1994 General Social Survey asked questions about the gender and birth order of survey respondents. These researchers findings are based on standard statistical analysis of that data, and they are in line with some previous studies that have looked at the same subject, but there are other studies that had different results, which is pretty common when you're building a body of social science literature on a topic. I have no doubt that if you actually read the study rather than its reporting in the news media, the researchers would be careful to explain study limitations and discuss what further research needed to be done to confirm or correct their findings.

The reality is that there are all kinds of complicated social facts that influence our beliefs and attitudes, and based on this study and a few others, it appears that having daughters may be one of them. If further study bears that out, it will be interesting to do some qualitative research to understand why that is the case. Obviously this doesn't mean that every person with a daughter is going to turn Republican. Moreover, there is a good likelihood that things have changed in the last twenty years.

People are responding to a scientific study based on emotion, rather than rationality, and attacking the study authors with no evidence of bad intentions on their part. It is anti-intellectual and counter to progressive goals to cry BS at a field and a methodology you don't understand completely just because you don't like the findings it produces.