Thanks for sharing the links to data/studies.

However, I don't think they support the idea that the nuclear family is harmful to african-americans.

A few points:

1. Logically, if certain behaviors/social arrangements are common within a community, then they inherently become 'norms' themselves.

2. The study you linked, associates cognitive scores at 2 years old to household structure. I personally don't think using data for 2 year olds is the best measure for determining the impact of household structures on life outcomes/the community. There's also a lot of massaging of the data to produce its final results, which raises a flag for me without further investigation (this does NOT mean anything untoward has happened, just flagging that).

3. All that being said, the study linked shows that the nuclear household is the second best household structure for african-americans (as measured by 2 year old cognitive scores), bested only by also having a grandparent around. Interestingly, grandparents weren't net good in every case. Here's a further quote directly from the study:

> Supplemental split models showed that for African American children, living with both grandparents and other adults was associated with a significantly lower cognitive score than living with grandparents or in a nuclear family

4. If that study is the backbone of the idea that the nuclear family is harmful for african-americans, then more attention should be paid to keeping other adults out of the house, and keeping biological parents in the household.

5. Just a word of advisement, as far as American social norms go for sharing data on cognitive scores across different racial groups, there's a strong norm to NOT share the data if it doesn't suggest perfect equality. The study you linked doesn't show perfect equality, so I would just be careful sharing in other environments.

We can't easily do empirical studies on the effects of family structures besides the nuclear family, because the nuclear family is the norm in Western society right now (and especially America).

That means that a) there will be very few such families to study (and where you do find larger populations that have non-nuclear family structures, there are likely to be other confounding factors, as they are likely to belong to some particular subculture). This reduces your sample sizes and makes it hard to draw rigorous conclusions based on the data you are able to collect.

But also b) any such families you find will be necessarily marginalized to some extent, because, again, the nuclear family is the norm, and that fundamentally means that those who eschew it will find themselves underrepresented and frequently discriminated against, both overtly and subtly.

That means that outcomes for such families in the real world, today, will be almost guaranteed to be worse than they could be otherwise, because of the exact thing BLM is trying to change (the nuclear-family norm).

The post I was responding to was attempting to use an empirical study to support a given sociological position for a given group (which from reading the study didn't actually support that position).

Now you are responding to me and saying empiricism cannot be used to support the given sociological position. Did you mean to respond to the poster I was responding to? I did not put forth that study in this thread.

Even given all of that, I strongly disagree with the anti-empiricism notion for this topic and any other related one.

On sample sizes being an issue:

-The US has 330 million people.

-There are 130 million households in the US.

-There are 74 million children in the US.

-35% of children have lived with a relative (i.e. non-nuclear) other than their parent or sibling at some point by age 18 (source: umich link the previous poster posted)

-And when you look beyond the US, the world has a population of 7 billion people

-Needless to say, we don't have a dearth of data to lean on to answer questions such as these

-There's also such a thing called statistical significance, which can be used to display the confidence of a result given the sample size. Studies usually use p=0.05

On the idea that non-majority populations/lifestyles automatically means guaranteed worse outcomes, I do not agree that's a given, and don't accept that it must be the case here. I have seen no causal chain presented yet (that also accounts for the available evidence). A couple counter-examples:

-Non-overweight people are the minority in the US, but their outcomes are much better, even though there are norms around larger/higher caloric meals in the US

-Same-sex couples, a minority, have higher household income than heterosexual couples

Do not misread the above examples as saying there's no discrimination going one way or the other or there being no confounding factors. They are showing that living a minority lifestyle does NOT guarantee worse outcomes. And we shouldn't assume that's the case without evidence for other things.

That just isn't true. Extended families are common and coexist with nuclear ones throughout the Mediterranean-influenced world, including the bulk of Latin America. That's a huge population to study. Not to mention Asia.