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 d

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.