Interesting, but take with a grain of salt:
Another caveat is the composition of the sample. The Nurses’ Health Study that the sample was drawn from is made up of overwhelmingly white women residing in the United States. “Since sex preferences and reproductive behaviors vary across cultures, religions, or countries … the sex ratio distribution pattern observed in our study may not apply to other societies,” the researchers acknowledge.
That’s true…
But applicable to almost all our medical information.
Like, the BMI scale was developed in the 1800s by a Belgian astronomer, based solely on European men of that time period.
But people are really fucking insistent we keep it, because in 6th grade a gym teacher said it was important.
To avoid bias from parents who stopped having children after reaching a preferred sex ratio, the researchers did not count each woman’s final birth in the analysis.
Uhhhh, I’m no statistician, but doesn’t that introduce a bias into the statistics? It means that you (potentially, depending on behaviour) have fewer examples of balanced-sex families.