The study, published last December by the journal Science, claimed that when openly gay canvassers in Los Angeles County knocked on a door and lobbied a household resident about same-sex marriage, the resident was more likely to form a lasting and favorable opinion of gay marriage than if they were lobbied by a heterosexual canvasser.
Co-authors Michael LaCour, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green, a political science professor at Columbia University, noted at the time the report was published that they were initially so skeptical of the results that they reran their experiment. The results were the same, they said.
But as the report was covered by news organizations nationwide — including the Los Angeles Times — another group of researchers began to question its findings.
Green said that two graduate students at UC Berkeley recently approached him with a list of irregularities they found in the data.
When LaCour’s advisers at UCLA reached out to him Monday, he was unable to provide the data he claimed he had collected for the study, including contact information for survey respondents, Green said.
“I write to request a retraction,” noted Green in a memo to Science on Tuesday. “I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors.”
LaCour did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment. On social media, he said he was “gathering evidence” and that he would provide a “single comprehensive response.”
Dr. Marcia McNutt, editor in chief of the journal Science, said in a statement that the journal “takes this case extremely seriously and will strive to correct the scientific literature as quickly as possible.”
“No peer review process is perfect, and in fact it is very difficult for peer reviewers to detect artful fraud,” McNutt said. “Fortunately, science is a self-correcting process; researchers publish work in the scholarly literature so that it can be further scrutinized, replicated, confirmed, rebutted or corrected. This is the way science advances.”
McNutt said it is publishing a note on the report to alert readers “to the fact that serious questions have been raised about the validity of findings in this study.”
The study also reported that the 20-minute doorstep conversations had a measurable “spillover effect,” in which some household residents who did not speak with the gay canvasser also formed a positive opinion of gay marriage.
In total, about 9,500 voters from Los Angeles County were involved in the study. The research was conducted in 2013 during the month leading up to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively overturned Proposition 8.
David Fleischer, project director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center Leadership LAB, said the group was “shocked and disheartened” by the turn of events.
“We are not in a position to fully interpret or assess the apparent irregularities in the research as we do not have access to the full body of information and, by design, have maintained an arm’s-length relationship with the evaluation of the project,” he said. “We support Donald Green’s retraction of the Science article and are grateful that the problems with LaCour’s research have been exposed.”
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