Polling’s Secrecy Problem; New York Times, 5/28/15

Nate Cohn, New York Times; Polling’s Secrecy Problem:

"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.

After all, the graduate student who wrote the paper on same-sex marriage, Michael LaCour, was called to account. Basic academic standards for transparency required him to disclose the information that ultimately empowered other researchers to cast doubt on his findings.

But even before the LaCour case, it was becoming obvious that a different group of public opinion researchers — public pollsters — adhere to much lower levels of transparency than academic social science does. Much of the polling world remains shielded from the kind of scrutiny that is necessary to identify and deter questionable practices."