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In Reply to: another family website posted by 1WhoKnows on August 15, 2004 at 13:39:38:
Interesting research article on Family children by an academic at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
http://www.wwrn.org/parse.php?idd=5000&c=151
Douglas M. Sell addresses the problem of standardized measurement that I've pointed out as a limitation of Lilliston & Shepherd's earlier work on psychological assessment of Family kids. He still doesn't solve the problem of the representativeness in a self-selected sample and lack of generalizability to the population as a whole, but that's OK as long as he doesn't make the claim that his study applies across the board.
The sample involves 172 kids in US and Canadian Homes. No mention of whether WS homes were included in the sample or whether every child in each home was tested, including those who might be considered problem cases and/or those who had expressed an intention to leave the group.
Standardized tests involved measures of Personality and Religiosity. Personality tests are a weak standardized measure for anxiety, but it can be argued that a well-adjusted personality indicates adequate anxiety management. I would prefer to see a more direct measure of brain disease processes such as anxiety reactions and depressive symptoms, since so many kids who leave the Family appear to develop drug & alcohol abuse problems and a fairly high number attempt suicide.
No standardized measures of educational achievement in the study.
In other words, 172 Family kids were measured on stuff the best of the bunch are likely to score well on. With a self-selected sample like this, the kids no doubt also would have scored fairly well on educational achievement. Hard to tell how these Family kids would score on standardized measures of anxiety & depression. Probably reasonably well, but we don't know that from the tests that were done.
