Hi all

Survey response is at an all time low, meaning that it is increasingly difficult to get meaningful data using surveys. Add to this: flat-out faking the data:

> How often do people conducting surveys simply fabricate some or all of the data? Several high-profile cases of fraud over the past few years have shone a spotlight on that question, but the full scope of the problem has remained unknown.  Yesterday, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., a pair of well-known researchers, Michael Robbins and Noble Kuriakose, presented a statistical test for detecting fabricated data in survey answers. When they applied it to more than 1000 public data sets from international surveys, a worrying picture emerged: About one in five of the surveys failed, indicating a high likelihood of fabricated data.

> But that claim is being hotly disputed by the Pew Research Center, one of the major funders of such surveys. And the organization has gone so far as to request the researchers desist from publishing their work. Pew’s actions are "pretty disappointing," says Kuriakose, a research scientist at SurveyMonkey in Palo Alto, California. "This problem isn't going to just go away."

PLB

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