Abstract
In the recent Demography article titled “The Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Laws on Different-Sex Marriage: Evidence From the Netherlands,” Trandafir attempted to answer the question, Are rates of opposite sex marriage affected by legal recognition of same-sex marriages? The results of his approach to statistical inference—looking for evidence of a difference in rates of opposite-sex marriage—provide an absence of evidence of such effects. However, the validity of his conclusion of no causal relationship between same-sex marriage laws and rates of opposite-sex marriage is threatened by the fact that Trandafir did not also look for equivalence in rates of opposite-sex marriage in order to provide evidence of an absence of such an effect. Equivalence tests in combination with difference tests are introduced and presented in this article as a more valid inferential approach to the substantive question Trandafir attempted to answer.
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Notes
The overall Type I error is controlled with α, rather than with α/2, because the intervals defined by H –01 and H –02 do not overlap.
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Dinno, A. Comment on “The Effect of Same-Sex Marriage Laws on Different-Sex Marriage: Evidence From the Netherlands”. Demography 51, 2343–2347 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0338-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0338-1