---
title: "New Family Structures Study"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Family_Structures_Study"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:07.980389+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The New Family Structures Study (abbreviated NFSS) is a sociological study of family structures conducted by sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin. The study surveyed over 15,000 Americans of ages 18 to 39. The first research article based on data from the study was published in July 2012 in Social Science Research. 
The article concluded that people who had had a parent who had been in a same-gender relationship were at a greater risk of several adverse outcomes, including "being on public assistance, being unemployed, and having poorer educational attainment". The study was met with considerable criticism from many academics, scholarly organizations, and medical journals. Of note, only two children in the study (of the 236 counted as having gay parents) had actually lived with homosexually partnered parents for their entire childhoods. Thus, negative outcomes or events cannot be attributed to having same-sex parents, because many of these children also spent their childhoods with opposite-sex parents, and experienced family disruption and parental divorce. 
A 2015 reanalysis raised serious questions about the validity of the study, finding misclassification of families, inconsistency in answers suggesting mischief, and evidence that many respondents did not live with their non-heterosexual parents. When these cases were excluded, differences in outcome between children raised by parents in opposite-sex and same-sex relationships largely vanished.

== Funding ==
The Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think-tank, contributed $695,000 in funding and the Bradley Foundation contributed $90,000. The Witherspoon Institute's president expected results that would be unfavorable to those supporting gay marriage. In the initial report, Regnerus stated that the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation played no role in the design of the study, and dismissed accusations that these organizations had improperly influenced him. In 2013, however, in response to requests by the American Independent News Network, emails sent between Regnerus and Witherspoon Institute employee Brad Wilcox were released which cast doubt on these statements. In one email, Wilcox approved several items relating to the study on behalf of the Witherspoon Institute. Critics have also noted that Wilcox was on the editorial board of Social Science Research, the journal in which the study was later published.

== Methodology ==
The NFSS survey of over 15,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 was conducted by Knowledge Networks on behalf of the University of Texas at Austin. Its stated purpose was to determine differences in outcomes among young adults raised in different family structures. The survey collected data from young adults and sorted them into the following categories, where "R" is the young adult questioned:

IBF: Lived in intact biological family (with mother and father) from 0 to 18, and parents are still married at present (N = 919)
LM: R reported R’s mother had a same-sex romantic (lesbian) relationship with a woman, regardless of any other household transitions or disruptions (N = 163)
GF: R reported R’s father had a same-sex romantic (gay) relationship with a man, regardless of any other household transitions or disruptions (N = 73)
Adopted: R was adopted by one or two strangers at birth or before age 2 (N = 101)
Divorced later or had joint custody: R reported living with biological mother and father from birth to age 18, but parents are not married at present (N = 116)
Stepfamily: Biological parents were either never married or else divorced, and R’s primary custodial parent was mar- ried to someone else before R turned 18 (N = 394)
Single parent: Biological parents were either never married or else divorced, and R’s primary custodial parent did not marry (or remarry) before R turned 18 (N = 816)
All others: Includes all other family structure/event combinations, such as respondents with a deceased parent (N = 406)

== Findings ==
The study compared various types of families, and found that subjects who perceived their mothers as having engaged in a same-sex relationship were more likely to have been sexually abused as children. When compared with those who grew up in (still) intact, biological mother–father families, the subjects who reported that their mother had had a same-sex relationship and did not make a similar report about their father look different on outcomes regarding including education, depression, employment status, and marijuana use.
Regnerus states although the findings reported may be explicable in part by a variety of forces uniquely problematic for child development in lesbian and gay families—including a lack of social support for parents, stress exposure resulting from persistent stigma, and modest or absent legal security for their parental and romantic relationship statuses—the empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go.
The term LM is used for subjects who stated that their mother had had a same-sex romantic relationship but did not make a similar statement about their father. The term GF is used for subjects that stated that their father had had a same-sex romantic relationship. The term IBF is used for subjects whose biological families were intact from birth through the time of the survey.

=== Table 2 ===
(The following results are mean scores on select dichotomous outcome variables.)
The results are read in the percentage of children from each family structure who responded positively to each question. For example, for the variable "currently married" 43% of respondents from intact bio-family answered yes, whereas 36% of those in the LM category answered yes, and 35% of those in the GF category answered yes.