BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

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Lem
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Lem »

I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but just wanted to quote a couple more conclusions the authors come to about what they think are "missing data":
Results by Sexual Orientation: Individuals Missing Sexual Orientation Data

Given they are not the focus of this paper, we briefly review results for those missing sexual orientation data, though full results are available in Appendix A.

For those missing sexual
orientation data, there were no significant differences between Latter-day Saints and Protestants
on considering suicide and attempting suicide. All other comparisons of suicidality and
depression were significant with Latter-day Saints being significantly lower than all other
religious groups and those of no religion. These significant differences remained through Model
5 except Protestants became statistically equal with Latter-day Saints when adding controls.

In the end, those missing data on sexual orientation were highly similar to heterosexuals and often
significantly different from LGBQ individuals.
Gee, I wonder why they concluded that final sentence? You don't ask 28000 sixth graders how they describe themselves and then you're surprised when they look mostly like the dominant group and significantly not like their smaller components.

smh.
Lem
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Lem »

Here's the kicker, though, ladies and gentlemen, from their conclusion.
Although we were not able to fully estimate the influence of disaffiliation, it should be noted that the majority of LGBQ
individuals who currently identify as Latter-day Saints have not had suicidal thoughts or attempts in the recent past.

Although the levels are still high compared to heterosexuals, it appears most LGBQ Latter-day Saints are not having suicidal thoughts.
So, not having suicidal thoughts, except that yes, they are having more suicidal thoughts than heterosexual youth? How do you argue both 'non' and 'less than'? I assume they mean across time, but they do not specify.

In my opinion then, the title of the piece should be:

"Latter-day Saint LGBTQ youths may have lower suicide risk in general, but yes, lgbtq lds youth ARE at higher risk of suicide than the heterosexual youth of this country, whatever religion they are, including ours. Oh, well. Can't win 'em all."
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

… estimate the influence of disaffiliation
-_-

- Doc
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Physics Guy
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Physics Guy »

As long as less than 50% of people are revealing suicidal thoughts, you can say that it appears that most people are not having suicidal thoughts.
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Lem
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Lem »

One more quote from the paper:
Sexual orientation.

Participants were asked: Which of the following best describe you? with responses: Heterosexual (straight), Bisexual, Gay or lesbian, Not sure.

Given the substantial number of missing values (27.2%), it was determined to treat “missing” as a distinct category within the analyses. Although these values could have been imputed, we did not have high confidence in substantially identifying the mechanism of missingness.

They are therefore treated as a unique category and it was examined if this group followed patterns of heterosexuals and LGBQ individuals in relation to the outcomes.
Well, I can help with the bolded “mechanism of missingness.”

As per page 4, note the footnote explaining the use of the sexual orientation question:

** A question about sexual orientation was added to the 2019 survey instrument used by 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. (6th grade surveys omitted this question.
So here is their “mechanism of missingness”:

When the data was coded into STATA, someone didn’t read the footnote above. All sixth grade survey entries recorded their answer to the sexual orientation question as “missing”, instead of some human sticking their head up and saying, “hey guys! I think we have a problem here….THIRTY PERCENT of our respondents didn’t get asked the one question we are relying on the most….”

“mechanism of missingness.” I am laughing my ass off over here at that one. Didn’t the mean grade of 6.11 for the missing answers, in a survey of grades 6, 8, 10, and 12 ONLY, tip anyone off?
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Physics Guy »

This isn't my kind of work, but my guess would be that they could probably salvage their study by just omitting all the 6th graders from their sample. Then they could also eliminate the "missing" category, so the results might be cleaner.

It's not obvious that the results would remain similar. Maybe a lot of the apparent effect of being Mormon is really just an effect of being in sixth grade. Most sixth graders are Mormon in Utah, I believe.

So maybe something solid could come out of this, and perhaps it would even have a similar conclusion.
These particular authors earnestly discuss the problem of "missingness", however, and complicate their study with a whole third category just to handle it, when the obvious explanation for the problem is stated explicitly in their source. It's hard to be confident in their ability to achieve a solid study, even with a correct sample, when they are evidently so liable to write pages of stuff based on a trivial misunderstanding.

In an ideal world, perhaps, everyone would have time to read everything, wheat could be threshed out of any amount of chaff, all babies would safely be swabbed dry of bath water, and valid conclusions would be appreciated in spite of distracting but ultimately irrelevant errors. Since no-one in this world has infinite time, however, people will inevitably dismiss your whole project once you cross a threshold level of carelessness. They're not necessarily deciding that you must be totally wrong, but they're deciding that the chance of learning something useful from your work is too low to warrant the necessary investment of time.

Because people are bound to use this criterion for deciding whether or not to read your work, it becomes an important part of scientific work to be careful even in small details that might not matter for the conclusion. Publishing an important message in a shoddy paper is in practice no better than not publishing the result at all, because no-one will actually appreciate the message. It's like shouting "Fire!" with your mouth full.
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doubtingthomas
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by doubtingthomas »

Although religion is ultimately responsible for the higher levels of depression/suicide in LGBTQ; other contributing factors have nothing to do with religion.

1. LGBTQ youth have significantly higher risk of sexual assault and abuse than their heterosexual peers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5543709/

2. Romantic relationships can help mitigate the harmful effects of bullying. However, more LGBTQ people are single.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-tren ... americans/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4931381/
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-04153-001?doi=1

3. People with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) experience difficulties with stability and trust in long-term relationships and have poor mental health.
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.c ... 20-09404-y
In addition, according to Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance data, compared with heterosexual youth, LGBT youth are more likely to be sexually active, to have earlier sexual debut (before age 13), and have 4 or more sexual partners.4 Compared with heterosexual youth, LGBT youth were about half as likely to have used a condom at last intercourse (35.8% vs 65.5%). These behaviors may partly explain why although the overall incidence rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis have decreased among adolescents in the last 15 years, they have increased among adolescent men who have sex with men (mainstream media).5 Adolescent mainstream media have also been disproportionately affected by HIV. Although mainstream media accounted for only 4% of the male population in the United States in 2010,6 they represented 78% of new HIV infections among men and 68% of total new infections
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5543709/

4. Some cultures are just ruthless towards LGBTQ
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexi ... SKBN22R37Y
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Dr Exiled
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Dr Exiled »

I'd like to see a study that looks at how parents and close relatives react to their lgtbq children/young adults. It seems to me that the inner core of the familial relationship probably is a key to depression/suicide outcomes. It's gotta be a big driver in this. The parents need to be interviewed and studied because their reaction has to be the main problem. Someone like E. Oaks that says he would refuse to have his son's boyfriend spend the night or daughter's girlfriend spend the night because he is afraid of appearances would probably have a huge negative affect on his son/daughter's psyche. Contrast that with someone, very religious and very TBM, who may not agree with the news but loves their child still and perhaps realizes that biology is biology regardless of what a group of old men say.
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by drumdude »

Dan just dismissed all of Lem's work as an ad-hom attack on the authors.

Shameful, Dan.
Lem
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Re: BYU Professors claim LDS Church reduces risk of depression/suicide in LGBTQ

Post by Lem »

drumdude wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:37 pm
Dan just dismissed all of Lem's work as an ad-hom attack on the authors.

Shameful, Dan.
I don't see that, but I did see this comment
dCyl > Michael Hoggan • 5 hours ago

I'm going to speak the unspeakable here.

Perhaps the same mental disturbances that raise the risk of suicide also raise the risk of same-sex attraction.

Of course, the idea that same-sex attraction might represent a form of mental disturbance is utterly beyond the pale to our scientific and cultural leaders.

http://disq.us/p/2k6rj0u
Wow.
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