Fake Data and the War in Iraq

Here are the slides from a talk I gave yesterday at RHUL's PIR department. It pulls together many threads that I've developed on the blog but I won't give the links here since they are embedded in the document.

Fabrication in Survey Data: A Sustainable Ecosystem

Here is a presentation I gave a few weeks ago on fabrication in survey data. It includes some staple material from the blog but, mainly, I set off in a new direction - trying to explain why survey data get fabricated in the first place. While writing the presentation I realized that these conditions are similar …

Data Dump Friday – Just Three this Week Plus a Cleanup of the Censorship Page

Hi. I've now put all the State Department public opinion polls conducted in Iraq during 2005 up on the conflict data page. I've also cleaned up the censorship page after I realized that its organization is worse than the organization on the conflict data page. And, yes, I should unite the two pages since there …

Secret Data Sunday – Gary Langer Edition

Last Sunday I shared an unanswered email I had sent to the Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality at ABC news.  The email gives a self-contained account of the overall context behind my data request, but I'll take another pass here just to be as clear as possible. There were a remarkable number of opinion polls …

Secret Data Sunday – ABC News (in the US) Stonewalls over their Dubious Iraq Public Opinion Polls

Below is an email that I sent to Kerry Smith, the Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality at ABC news, back in November of 2016. She did not reply..   Dear Ms. Smith, I am a professor of economics specialized in the quantitative analysis of armed conflict.  I have a big body of work focused on …

Special Journal Issue on Fabrication in Survey Research

The Statistical Journal of the IAOS has just released a new issue with a bunch of articles on fabrication in survey research, a subject of great interest for the blog. Unfortunately, most of the articles are behind a paywall but, thankfully, the overview by Steve Koczela and Fritz Scheuren is open access.  It's a beautiful piece …

Dispute Resolution by Mutual Maiming

I'm puzzled by the following sequence of events.  (This story has a very clear summary.) The UN issues a report entitled "Children and Armed Conflict".  The report highlights quite a few groups for committing grave abuses against children.  The "Saudi Arabia-led Coalition"  in the war in Yemen is on this UN blacklist.  The report fingers …

Check out my New Article at STATS.org

Hello everybody. Please have a look at this new article that has just gone up on STATS.org. It is a compact exposition of the evidence of fabrication in public opinion surveys in Iraq as well as the threats and debates flowing from this evidence. My current plan for the blog is to do one follow …

Langer Research Associates Responds: Part IV

This continues the stream of posts beginning here and continuing through here, here, here and here. Today I had wanted to write on duplicates in the D3/KA Iraq surveys but I've hit a little snag in the analysis so I will postpone this subject for the near future. Instead, today I'll cover empty categories, that is, answer choices …

Langer Research Associates Responds: Part III

This post is a continuation of this one and this one with further links to be found in the first two. I'll start with an important announcement.  Steve Koczela just had success with a Freedom of Information Request to the US State Department.  This means that he now has a mountain of new polling data from Iraq …