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Graduate student responsible for retracted gay marriage study issues 23-page statement

Graduate student responsible for retracted gay marriage study issues 23-page statement

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Earlier this week, Science retracted a highly publicized 2014 study that claimed contact with gay canvassers could change people's minds about same-sex marriage. Now, one of the study's authors, Michael LaCour, has responded to the retraction in the form of a 23-page essay and analysis that he sent to media watchdog iMediaEthics today.

LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, uses the essay to counter the three key reasons Science gave for retracting the study, namely, "the misrepresentation of survey incentives, false statements of sponsorship," and "the inability to produce original data." The discrepancies were first discovered by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at UC Berkeley who were planning an extension of the study. LaCour's abstract says his statement will "introduce evidence uncovering discrepancies between the timeline of events presented in Broockman et al. (2015) and the actual timeline of events and disclosure."

The essay also argues that Broockman and Kalla failed to disclose their critique to LaCour, and that they also "notably omit the primary analyses reported in the main text of LaCour and Green (2014)." LaCour's co-author Donald Green has said previously he agreed with the retraction, according to iMediaEthics.