If you, like me, were given hope by the uplifting This American Life story on how door-to-door canvassing by LGBT people about marriage equality changed peoples’ minds, I’ve got bad news for you.
The research on the technique’s efficacy was published in Science in 2014, but the study’s lead author has since admitted that his co-author falsified some of their data and has asked the journal to retract the paper.
Damn.
As Retraction Watch points out, though, at least the paper’s author swiftly acted to retract the paper when he learned that it was a fraud.
Michael LaCour attended my summer workshop on experimental design in 2012 and proposed at that time a project that involved both canvassing and internet surveys. It sounded to me too ambitious to be realistic for a graduate student but in principle worthwhile. I later introduced him to Dave Fleischer, who heads up the LGBT canvassing operation in Los Angeles, and they struck up a collaboration. Several weeks after the canvassing launched in June 2013, Michael LaCour showed me his survey results. I thought they were so astonishing that the findings would only be credible if the study were replicated. (I also had some technical concerns about the “thermometer” measures used in the surveys.) Michael LaCour and Dave Fleischer therefore conducted a second experiment in August of 2013, and the results confirmed the initial findings. Convinced that the results were robust, I helped Michael LaCour write up the findings, especially the parts that had to do with the statistical interpretation of the experimental design. Given that I did not have IRB approval for the study from my home institution, I took care not to analyze any primary data — the datafiles that I analyzed were the same replication datasets that Michael LaCour posted to his website. Looking back, the failure to verify the original Qualtrics data was a serious mistake.
Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked [Retraction Watch]
(via Mitch Wagner)
(Image: VA: Working America Canvasser Megan Challender,
Bernard Pollack, CC-BY)