NPO Collaborates with PASG to Challenge Flawed Research
National Parents Organization is collaborating with the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG) to call for the retraction of badly flawed research denying the scientific research on parental alienation.
Parental alienation is a serious form of psychological abuse that causes enormous harm to the children and parents victimized by it. More than 1,000 books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles have been published on the topic and there is increasing scientific recognition of the existence, causes, and effects of parental alienation. It has been the subject of documentary films, such as Erasing Family, produced and directed by Ginger Gentile.
Nonetheless, even in the face of this overwhelming research and the painful personal experience of thousands of parents and children, there are parental alienation deniers. One of the most influential is Joan Meier, Professor of Clinical Law at George Washington University Law School. Meier has repeatedly described parental alienation as a “pseudo-scientific theory.”
In 2019, Meier led a small team of collaborators to produce a paper that misportrays parental alienation as a strategy used by abusive fathers to prevent mothers from protecting their children from the abuse.The paper wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal but, instead, in an in-house publication venue at the George Washington University. This means that the research presented in Meier’s article was not subjected to review by other researchers.
After publication of Meier’s article, her research was reviewed and analyzed by two experts on parental alienation, Dr. Jennifer Harman (Psychology, Colorado State University) and Dr. Demosthenes Lorandos (PsychNet). In their peer-reviewed article (previously discussed here), “Allegations of Family Violence in Court: How Parental Alienation Affects Judicial Outcomes,” published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Harman and Lorandos identify “at least 30 conceptual and methodological problems with the design and analyses of the study that make the results and the conclusions drawn dubious at best.”
Despite these flaws, Meier’s paper has, at the urging of Meier and her co-authors, been employed to try to justify legislative and policy changes that would delegitimize allegations of parental alienation.
The danger of important legal and policy matters being grounded on such flawed research led NPO to collaborate with PASG to write a detailed letter to the editors of the George Washington Law School’s Public Policy & Legal Theory Research Paper Series calling for them to retract Meier’s paper. (Read the letter here.) To date, the editors have not responded to our appeal.
NPO and PASG are continuing and expanding our efforts to minimize the damage we believe is threatened by reliance on unscientific research on parental alienation.
