Grad student accused of faking gay marriage data planning 'comprehensive response'

[Dubious]

By
David Malakoff
20 May 2015 1:45 pm
17 Comments


A political science graduate student accused of faking data behind a recent Science paper on gay marriage is preparing to offer a defense “at my earliest opportunity,” according to statements posted on his Twitter account. “I’m gathering evidence and relevant information so I can provide a single comprehensive response,” tweeted an account registered to Michael J. LaCour, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, at about 12:15 p.m. Eastern Time today.

Yesterday, the paper's co-author, political scientist Donald Green of Columbia University, sent a letter to Science asking to retract the December 2014 paper as a result of concerns about the underlying data. LaCour was the only other author of the paper.

The study, based on in-person and Internet surveys of some 9500 registered voters in California conducted by a survey company, found that even relatively short conversations with a gay canvasser could make voters more supportive of gay marriage and equality. But questions about the study arose earlier this month when another group of researchers began a follow-on study, but got very different preliminary results. When they approached the survey company for information about the original methods, “the survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the [original] project and … denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green,” the researchers report in a statement posted online.

The researchers ultimately took their concerns to Green, who questioned LaCour. Green told the researchers that LaCour admitted to misrepresenting some data. Green told Politico’s Nick Gass that he asked LaCour “to write a retraction, and he indicated he would do so, but when it did not appear last night, I sent off my own retraction.”

“Given the fact that Dr. Green has requested retraction, Science will move swiftly and take any necessary action at the earliest opportunity,” said Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt in a statement. “In the meantime, Science is publishing an Editorial Expression of Concern to alert our readers to the fact that serious questions have been raised about the validity of findings in this study.”


Grad student accused of faking gay marriage data planning 'comprehensive response' | Science/AAAS | News

Interesting.....Sooo questioning a study is not wrong how some people here think that science means written in stone.... and quoting some papers means they made their point

 

[Dubious]

MAY 22, 2015
How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong
BY MARIA KONNIKOVA

A study that had excited researchers and journalists alike now looks suspect. What happened?CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY CROSS/THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY
provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that.

The Science study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” seemed to offer a method that could work. The authors—Donald Green, a tenured professor of political science at Columbia University, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student in the poli-sci department at U.C.L.A.—enlisted a group of canvassers from the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center to venture into the L.A. neighborhoods where voters had supported Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. The canvassers followed standardized scripts meant to convince those voters to change their minds through non-confrontational, one-on-one contact. Over the following nine months, the voters were surveyed at various intervals to see what those conversations had achieved. The survey highlighted a surprising distinction. When canvassers didn’t talk about their own sexual orientations, voters’ shifts in opinion were unlikely to last. But if canvassers were openly gay—if they talked about their sexual orientations with voters—the voters’ shifts in opinion were still in evidence in the survey nine months later. The messenger, it turned out, was just as important as the message. The study formed the basis for a segmentof “This American Life,” and was featured on Science Friday and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. LaCour was offered a job at Princeton.

Five months after the study’s original publication, on Tuesday, May 19th, a PDF was posted to the Web site of David Broockman, a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley at the time. (This summer, he will start working as a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.) In the document, “Irregularities in LaCour (2014),” Broockman, along with a fellow graduate student, Joshua Kalla, and a professor at Yale, Peter Aronow, argued that the survey data in the study showed multiple statistical irregularities and was likely “not collected as described.” Almost simultaneously, Green sent a letter to Science asking to retract the paper: given the preponderance of evidence, he, too, believed that LaCour had fabricated the study’s results. His letter soon appeared on the site Retraction Watch, and, on Wednesday, Science posted an “Editorial expression of concern.” Many media outlets appended editors’ notes to their stories. A study that had excited researchers and journalists alike now looks suspect. What went wrong?

Green and LaCour first met in the summer of 2012, at the University of Michigan. Green was teaching a week-long summer workshop on experimental methods; LaCour was one of the students who signed up. “He was enterprising, he was energetic, [he was] technically able,” Green recalled, when we spoke yesterday. When LaCour proposed an idea for a field study about changing voters’ views on gay marriage through a contact-based approach, Green, who studies prejudice, was receptive.

Good, careful, and controlled field experiments are a relative rarity in political science; it’s difficult to devise and execute rigorous studies outside of the laboratory. But Green happened to know someone with the capability to execute the field intervention: his friend Dave Fleischer, who runs the Leadership Lab at the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center. Fleischer’s canvassers were out in the field—collectively, they had already conducted twelve thousand one-on-one conversations with voters—and their efforts seemed to be a good platform for the study. When Fleischer met LaCour, he was impressed. “He was a protégé of Don Green’s. I have enormous respect for Don. His integrity is unimpeachable. If he says someone is a good guy, it means a lot to me. And I respected Mike’s intelligence, his command of statistics, his interest—which was genuine—in what we were doing,” Fleischer said. He was also excited to receive an independent assessment of the program’s impact. “We were eager to measure how effective our work was in terms of magnitude and duration. We were doing a conscientious self-assessment all along, but that’s not a substitute for an honest independent assessment of your work.”

A year later, in the summer of 2013, LaCour told Green that the study they’d discussed back in Ann Arbor was complete: the results suggested that talking with openly gay canvassers could produce a durable attitude shift in favor of gay marriage. “I’m used to studying prejudice, teaching prejudice, thinking about prejudice, and the literature is just suffused with pessimism about any prospect of attitude change,” Green told me. “And here we have a study that shows it has profound effects to have contact with gays.” Green was skeptical, and told LaCour that he needed to replicate the findings by sending out a second wave of Fleischer’s canvassers and surveying a second set of voters. LaCour reported back; it appeared, Green said, that “the magic happened again.” The data looked statistically solid, and the analyses seemed to back up LaCour’s claims. The survey response rates looked abnormally high, but LaCour claimed to have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money to offer bonuses to people who responded to the survey; it was reasonable to think that the money was enough to account for their continued participation. Green volunteered to help LaCour draft the study. The next year, it was published.

far quicker to believe things that mesh with our view of how life should be. Green is a firm supporter of gay marriage, and that may have made him especially pleased about the study. (Did it have a similar effect on liberally minded reviewers at Science? We know that studies confirming liberal thinking sometimes get a pass where ones challenging those ideas might get killed in review; the same effect may have made journalists more excited about covering the results.) Green says that the main factor in his enthusiasm for the study was its elegant design. “There’s a literature on attitudes toward gay people and how they change in the wake of contact, but it’s not very good,” he said. By contrast, this was “a beautiful study” because it took place outside of the lab, and because “it separated the canvassing from the measurement.” Green was especially enthusiastic about the mode of interaction used by the canvassers, which other studies have also shown to be effective. “It’s a very high-quality interaction. It’s not confrontational,” he said. “It’s a respectful two-way conversation and the person expressing the view is doing it in a way that accentuates shared goals.” Perhaps because of his enthusiasm, Green took what he saw as the best precaution—asking LaCour to replicate his results—but, he said, “didn’t realize that strategy had one gaping flaw: the same guy generated the data both times.”

In short, confirmation bias—which is especially powerful when we think about social issues—may have made the study’s shakiness easier to overlook. But, perhaps ironically, it was enthusiasm about the study that led to its exposure. The events of the past few days were the result not of skepticism but of belief. Red flags were raised because David Broockman and Joshua Kalla liked the study and wanted to build on it. “One way to spin this story is [to talk about] scientific fraud and the field’s susceptibility to it,” Green said. “But if there’s a silver lining here it’s the robust self-correcting aspects of science. David and Josh couldn’t redo the study in the same way, so they started to ask deeper and deeper questions about the first study. They are the heroes of this story.” Broockman and Kalla are now working with Fleischer to give the story a happier ending: when we spoke, Fleischer said that the three of them were in the process of running a new version of the study.

How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong - The New Yorker

I have nothing against people and their orientation...it is their matter but lying only makes it bad!

Sounds just like that guy who claimed to have found the gay gene

 

[DrawingDead]

Interesting.....Sooo questioning a study is not wrong how some people here think that science means written in stone.... and quoting some papers means they made their point

No, questioning a study and looking at underlying facts that led to the conclusions is the very foundation of science. You've already highlighted what's great about science in your second post as compared to something like, say faith? So there's no point in me going into that.

Red flags were raised because David Broockman and Joshua Kalla liked the study and wanted to build on it. “One way to spin this story is [to talk about] scientific fraud and the field’s susceptibility to it,” Green said. “But if there’s a silver lining here it’s the robust self-correcting aspects of science. David and Josh couldn’t redo the study in the same way, so they started to ask deeper and deeper questions about the first study.

 

[Dubious]

No, questioning a study and looking at underlying facts that led to the conclusions is the very foundation of science.

I am aware...But some people here die when I question anything it is for them....

You've already highlighted what's great about science in your second post as compared to something like, say faith?

More like a craving for knowledge and to understand....

 

[DrawingDead]

I am aware...But some people here die when I question anything it is for them....

Well, your case is a little different. I'd rather not get into that and derail this thread.

 

[Dubious]

Well, your case is a little different.

That portion I wrote after the link to indicate it is not part of the study but from me.....

Thank you for not derailing!

 

[Indus Falcon]

Interesting.....Sooo questioning a study is not wrong how some people here think that science means written in stone.... and quoting some papers means they made their point

Don't worry about it. Quoting white papers, doesn't mean anything. They just show their level of intellect, or rather lack of!

 

[Dubious]

Don't worry about it. Quoting white papers, doesn't mean anything. They just show their level of intellect, or rather lack of!

some are good....But that doesnt mean they are bullet proof....Just some people are soo.....