Comment on Lee and Conley (2016) "Does the Gender of Offspring Affect Parental Political Orientation?" Lee and Conley's Null Findings Are Likely due to Measurement Error in their Measure of Sex of First Child
Lee and Conley (2016) find null effects of sex of the first born child on political orientation in thirty six countries. Null effects in statistical analyses may occur because there is no relationship between the variables in the population, in this case, between sex of the first born child and political orientation. Null effects may also occur because of measurement error or noise in one or more of the variables. Unfortunately, Lee and Conley's null findings are likely due to the latter rather than the former, specifically measurement error in their measure of the sex of the first born child. When using data from the General Social Survey (henceforth GSS) Lee and Conley (2016) measure the sex of the respondent's first child by using the household register of individuals who usually live in the household. Since the wording of these questions is important, I give the actual GSS question wording verbatim here, although I have taken the liberty of bolding certain terms: