The new yorker how a gay marriage study went wrong

A study that had excited researchers and journalists alike now looks suspect. What went wrong? Green and LaCour first met in the summer ofat the University of Michigan. 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.

A study published in Science magazine suggested that attitudes toward same-sex marriage were more likely to be changed by face-to-face conversations with gay canvassers over straight ones. A study was done to examine "transmission of support for gay equality" (How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong | The New Yorker, n.d.) by Michael LaCour and coauthor Donald Green.

With the help of a group of canvassers they interviewed 12, voters and surveyed them for their study. The author of a newly retracted gay marriage study claims that he destroyed the data that would prove his findings were legitimate. He is president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm. Broockman hoped that someone would pick up his observations and run with them.

I emailed him to ask whether he thought this was a fair assessment.

An Interview With Donald Green, the Co-Author of the Faked Gay-Marriage Study

Most Popular. The other concern was with the shape of the feelings-thermometer data over time. In fact, he quickly found himself nervous about openly discussing his reservations at all. David Atkins. This password will be used to sign into all New York sites. Not just pretty convincing — I should say quite convincing. Saved for later.

Science magazine retracts gay-marriage article

LaCour made a big splash with fabricated data purporting to show that voter opinions on gay marriage shifted dramatically and essentially permanently based on a single in-person canvass conversation with an LGBT person telling their own personal story. There was no employee named Jason Peterson at uSamp. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited. But it was all a lie, eventually and painstakingly exposed by David Broockman, another graduate student at UC Berkeley.

First, the budget-conscious Broockman had to figure out how much such an enterprise might cost. The question of what does this mean about the integrity of science, or the integrity of scientific vetting procedures — I suppose you could look at it one of two ways. Account Profile. Enter your email: Please enter a valid email address. While the canvassing did occur, there may not have been any survey data collected from California voters at all.

The right thing to do here is set in motion a new study, and do it properly.

Broockman had decided the best plan was to take their concerns to Green instead of LaCour in order to reduce the chance that LaCour could scramble to contrive an explanation. Sign Out. What is your email? Which no graduate student does. And then, of course, there were the red flags in the data itself. Connect with Google Connect with Facebook. It remains to be seen.

Instead, chastened by his deleted attempt to post his concerns anonymously and the lack of clear findings from his data analysis, Broockman pressed on with his academic work.