More on civics survey data

by David Safier

I don't know if Matthew Ladner is working from his end to discover whether or not the public school/private school survey he commissioned from Strategic Vision LLC was legit or fraudulent. But I have to say, he's been very forthcoming with documentation. I asked him if he would give me the raw data connected with the survey, and he sent it to me.

I forwarded it on to Adam Molnar, an assistant prof at Bellarmine University in Kentucky who teaches statistics and is looking into this as well. Molnar found no smoking gun. The raw data agreed with the data in the study. His conclusion from this?

This shows that Strategic Vision, LLC, sent a full-sized set of data to the Goldwater Institute. He took that data at face value and worked from there. There's nothing in there to disqualify this data, and by sending it to you Dr. Ladner is being honest.

The problem is that the results are still very, very different from what everyone else has acquired. They stretch belief, but at this point it's still not proof. Did SV LLC make the calls to get rows, or did they create data? It wouldn't take much time to create the data; I could make a set of tables in a day. Then the company would have to maintain the fallacy.

I agree. This isn't proof of anything one way or another. If I ran a survey company and had larceny in my heart, I would create all the material that would come out of a real survey. I just wouldn't go through the expense of actually doing the survey.

I have to say, this whole discussion of the possibility that SV faked the data was a complete surprise to me when someone alerted me to it. If we find out the company is legit, that's fine. But if they've been faking their results and G.I. or others can document it, they should be run out of the business on a rail.