L’Affaire Burnham: Ten Years Later

I just gave this presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) in Toronto. The title of the talk is taken from Richard Kulka's Presidential Address to AAPOR.  Back in 2009 AAPOR censured Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University for refusing to disclose basic information about his methodology for …

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.

Secret Data Sunday – BBC Edition Part 2 – Data Journalism without Data

Last week I described my initial attempt to obtain some Iraq survey data from the BBC. You can skip the long back story that explains my interest in these data sets if you want.  In short, though, these award-winning polls played an important role in establishing the historical record for the latest Iraq war but they …

Secret Data Sunday – BBC Edition Part 1

If you have spent any time on this blog you know that D3 Systems, together with KA Research Limited, fielded a lot of polls in Iraq during the occupation and that the ones I've managed to analyze show extensive evidence of containing fabricated data. Some such polls were commissioned by ABC news and won big awards. …

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 …

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 …

More Evidence of Fabrication in D3 Polls in Iraq: Part 2

On Tuesday I provided some eye-popping comparisons on one Iraq survey fielded by D3/KA against another Iraq survey fielded by another company at exactly the same time.  In light of this evidence any reasonable person has to agree that the D3/KA data are fabricated.  Nevertheless, today I give you a different window into the same …

More Evidence of Fabrication in D3 Polls in Iraq: Part 1

Veteran readers know that I have posted a lot of this subject, including here, here, here, here , here and here. To recap, a bunch of Iraq polls fielded by D3 Systems and its partner KA Research Limited contain data that appear to be fabricated.  In particular, there is a list of supervisors who consistently preside over non-credible …