By John Mack Freeman
Donald Green has retracted “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support of gay marriage” from the December 2014 issue of Science because of new information that has emerged that the data used in the study was fabricated. The study received a good deal of press attention when it was published because it demonstrated that those who had short conversations with gay people were more likely to view same sex marriage in a positive light. The fabricated data came to light due to the investigation into irregularities by students at the University of California, Berkley. Via Politico:
The students’ report chronicles numerous irregularities of the study, which they said allegedly consisted of “repeated observations of the same 11,948 voters over a series of weeks,” including the use of the “feeling thermometer” survey technique, which they called “notoriously unreliable” in terms of measurement error.
“However, in both studies, respondents’ feeling thermometer values are extremely reliable — more so than nearly any other survey items of which we are aware,” the report states.
The co-author of the study Michael LaCour maintained as of the time of this writing that the data was not fabricated, but that he could not locate the original source file in Qualtrics.