RMME/STAT Joint Colloquium

The Collapse of Scientific Standards in the World of High Visibility Survey Research

Dr. Jon Krosnick
Stanford University

Friday, June 18th, at 12:00PM ET

https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=m6b0af866c35360de3b7819e6204bc121

In parallel to the explosion of the replication crisis across the sciences, survey research has experienced its own crisis of credibility – and very publicly. Election after election, pre-election polls in recent years in the U.S., Britain, Israel, and elsewhere have been widely viewed as inaccurate. After each failure to accurately predict election outcomes, the survey research profession has implemented a self-study to try to explain its inaccuracies, presumably in order to learn useful lessons for improving practices. And yet inaccuracies have continued unabated. This talk will review the evidence of inaccuracy and propose and test an explanation that has received little attention: that leading survey researchers have all but abandoned well-validated scientific procedures for data collection and data analysis and have misrepresented their procedures as having more scientific integrity than they in fact have. Interestingly, the lessons learned have implications for academic research in the social sciences, in medicine, and in other fields.

 

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