What if all the best scholarly research about children with lesbian or gay parents was gathered into a single online portal? The “What We Know” project has done just that, and will likely become a key reference for policymakers, journalists, researchers, and the public.
The project, housed at Columbia Law School, is intended to inform people about expert consensus on controversial public policy issues. Described by its founders as “part online library, part communications outreach tool,” its first phase focuses on LGBT equality, starting with the well-being of children with lesbian and gay parents.
Project director Nathaniel Frank, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized authority on LGBT public policy best known for his work on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Principal investigator Katherine Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and director of the school’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. Along with other project staff and a board of advisors, they choose studies for the portal using a strict set of criteria for “credibility, relevance and usefulness.” Articles must be “peer-reviewed, published in a scholarly journal, and directly relevant to the policy question at hand.”
The site has compiled 70 key studies dating back to 1980 and concluding that “children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children.” There are abstracts along with links to the full studies on their original sites. (Not all full studies are available without a subscription to the journal in question.)
Read the full article at Mombian.