The full report. Briefly: Michael LaCour, a PhD candidate in poli sci at UCLA, got a lot of attention for a paper co-authored with Donald Green in 2014:
LaCour and Green (2014, Science) report a remarkable result: a ~20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser produces large positive shifts in feelings towards gay people that persist for over a year. The study’s design is also notable: over 12% of voters invited to participate in the ostensibly unrelated survey that formed the study’s measurement apparatus agreed to be surveyed; nearly 90% were successfully reinterviewed; and each voter referred an average of 1.33 other voters to be part of the study who lived in the study area. The paper is based on a dataset that allegedly describes two field experiments, LaCour (2014).
Other researchers, taken by the results, want to pursue the research further: "Hoping we could harness the same procedures that produced the original study’s high reported response rate, we attempt to contact the survey firm we believed had performed the original study and ask to speak to the staffer at the firm who we believed helped perform Study 1 in LaCour and Green (2014). The survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for. The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014)."
Presented with this and other evidence of irregularities, Prof. Green "agrees a retraction is in order unless LaCour provides countervailing evidence." Prof. Green then reports that "LaCour has been confronted and has confessed to falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection," and proceeds to post a public retraction of the 2014 paper.
Barring some further exonerating circumstances, I would imagine this is the end of Mr. LaCour's career as an academic political scientist.
(Thanks to L.A. Paul for the pointer.)
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