The debunking of a recent academic paper on changing views about same-sex marriage has raised concerns about whether other political science research is being properly vetted and verified. But the scandal may actually point to vulnerabilities in a different field: public polls. CONT. Nate Cohn, New York Times Read more »
A hopeful study … debunked
A study found a short conversation with a gay person could make people more open to marriage equality, and the media reported it as a hopeful sign. But the findings were faked. Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch tells Brooke how the bad data got past the peer review process, journalists, […] Read more »
How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong
Last December, Science published a provocative paper about political persuasion. Persuasion is famously difficult: study after study—not to mention much of world history—has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them. … The Science study, “When contact […] Read more »
Election polls face a crisis of confidence
A series of recent high-profile misses by election polls in several countries has sent the worldwide polling industry into one of its moments of doubt and self-examination. … Although each of these misses can be explained, and polling in multiparty parliamentary elections is more fraught with challenges than America’s mostly […] Read more »
Methods can matter: Where Web surveys produce different results than phone interviews
Over the past year, Pew Research Center conducted an experiment to see if the mode by which someone was surveyed – in this case, a telephone survey with an interviewer versus a self-administered survey on the Web – would have any effect on the answers people gave. We used two […] Read more »
SurveyMonkey Was The Other Winner Of The U.K. Election
To more than one pundit, last week’s election in the United Kingdom looked like it would be the closest in a generation. But at SurveyMonkey’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters, thousands of miles away, things looked very different: Respondents to an online poll conducted by the Internet survey company from April […] Read more »