Unbelievable! Researcher Behind Faulty Gay Marriage Study Lied About Funding

25 May, 2015 by Jennifer Van Laar

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UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour not only produced a fabricated gay marriage study – he lied about the funding for it.

In fact, according to The New Yorker, LaCour received no funding at all for the study — which was published last December in Science magazine and discredited earlier this week — into whether views on same-sex marriage change due to interaction with gay individuals.

“He didn’t have any grants coming to him. He had a small one that he didn’t accept,” Donald Green, the co-author of the retracted study and a political science professor at Columbia University, told The New Yorker about the study that claimed respondents started to accept same-sex marriage after positive interactions with gay people.

Green, who played little role in the the doctored research, said he discovered this fact after asking LaCour’s adviser, Lynn Vavreck, to look into the matter Monday after LaCour’s data was questioned by researchers from the University of California-Berkeley.

LaCour, according to his curriculum vitae, claimed over $300,000 in grant money was given to his research on gay marriage attitudes. The fake money was supposed to compensate respondents who participated in the researcher’s study.

Although LaCour admitted he had no data to back up his findings, he is still standing by them. Maybe he hasn’t yet received the memo that research includes data to prove your hypothesis, not just wishing it to be true.