Friday, September 28, 2012

Regnerus Anti-Gay Scandal: Clear Evidence Of Misconduct


By Scott Rose:
We have been reporting on a politically-motivated hoax “study” of supposedly gay and lesbian parents, funded through the National Organization For Marriage (NOM) linked Witherspoon Institute and carried out by Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin (UT).
Regnerus and Witherspoon repeatedly have alleged that Witherspoon had no involvement in the design, conduct or analyses of the study.
Regnerus makes that false claim in his published study.
Witherspoon makes it in the stand-alone site created to promote the study:
One element of evidence we already had, proving that the claim is false, is a Regnerus study consulting contract — for data analysis — issued by UT and signed by Witherspoon’s Brad Wilcox; Wilcox’s contract is the second one viewable at this link.
As a follow-up to the discovery of Wilcox’s Regnerus study consulting contract for data analysis, this reporter sent an Open Records Act (OPA) request to UT for all Regnerus study-related communications between Regnerus and Wilcox.
In response to that request, UT sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, asking for  OPA exceptions to get out of having to comply with the document request.
In that letter, UT revealed that Regnerus’s funding agency representative — Witherspoon’s Wilcox — collaborated with Regnerus not only on study data analysis but also on data collection.
The first two pages at this link are UT’s letter to Attorney General Abbott, with the description of Wilcox’s involvement in Regnerus study data collection and analysis highlighted on the second page; the third page shows Regnerus’s shameless lies about his funders not being involved in data collection and analysis for his study.

Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and Regnerus in his published study says that a “leading family researcher” from the University of Virginia was on his study design team.
Regnerus’s deliberate lie — written into his published study — wherein his funders were said not to be involved with the conduct of his study, irrefutably constitutes misconduct.
Be sure to note that the UT letter to the Texas AG states that the Open Records Act request should not be fulfilled because the data of the Regnerus study “can be used to validate the original survey instrumentation,” in other words, it can be used to determine whether Regnerus and Wilcox committed fabrication and/or falsification.
To sign a petition telling Elsevier to retract the Regnerus study from publication in that company’s journal Social Science Researchgo here.

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