Maligned Study on Gay Unions Is Shaking Trust

He was a graduate student who seemingly had it all: drive, a big idea and the financial backing to pay for a sprawling study to test it.

In 2012, as same-sex marriage advocates were working to build support in California, Michael LaCour, a political science researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked a critical question: Can canvassers with a personal stake in an issue — in this case, gay men and women — actually sway voters’ opinions in a lasting way?

He would need an influential partner to help frame, interpret and place into context his findings — to produce an authoritative scientific answer. And he went to one of the giants in the field, Donald P. Green, a Columbia University professor and co-author of a widely used text on field experiments.

“I thought it was a very ambitious idea, so ambitious that it might not be suitable for a graduate student,” said Dr. Green, who signed on as a co-author of Mr. LaCour’s study in 2013. “But it’s such an important question, and he was very passionate about it.”

Last week, their finding that gay canvassers were in fact powerfully persuasive with people who had voted against same-sex marriage — published in December in Science, one of the world’s leading scientific journals — collapsed amid accusations that Mr. LaCour had misrepresented his study methods and lacked the evidence to back up his findings.

On Tuesday, Dr. Green asked the journal to retract the study because of Mr. LaCour’s failure to produce his original data. Mr. LaCour declined to be interviewed, but has said in statements that he stands by the findings.

The case has shaken not only the community of political scientists but also public trust in the way the scientific establishment vets new findings. It raises broad questions about the rigor of rules that guide a leading academic’s oversight of a graduate student’s research and of the peer review conducted of that research by Science.

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