Do Schools Discriminate Against Homosexual Parents? Evidence from an Internet Field Experiment

The recognition of homosexual rights is a controversial issue in many countries. Spain was the third country in the world (after Netherlands and Belgium) to introduce a law recognizing homosexual marriage and adoption of children. In this paper, we examine for the first time whether schools are more hesitant to give feedback to homosexual parents during children's pre-registration period in Spain. In order to do that, we designed an internet field experiment to be conducted in schools. We created three types of fictitious couples; one heterosexual, one male homosexual and one female homosexual, and send emails to schools making sexual orientation explicit. Our results show that men homosexual couples had a significant lower probability to receive and answer than heterosexual couples (22.5 percentage points less). No statistically significant differences in the response rate were found between female homosexual and heterosexual couples. This result suggests that male homosexual couples might be penalized because of the lack of a maternal figure. Keywords: Discrimination, field experiment, schools, homosexual rights. JEL codes: H41, I20, K36

Social Presence Approach Within the Question and Answering eLearning Model: An Experiment with a Multi-Agent System

The model of Questions Answering (Q&A) for eLearning is based on collaborative learning through questions that are posed by students and their answers to that questions which are given by peers, in contrast with the classical model in which students ask questions to the teacher only. In this proposal we extend the Q&A model including the social presence concept and a quantitative measure of it is proposed; besides it is considered the evolution of the resulting Q&A social network after the inclusion of the social presence and taking into account the feedback on questions posed by students and answered by peers. The social network behaviorwas simulated using a Multi-Agent System to compare the proposed social presence model with the classical and the Q&A models