It’s a tutorial prepare wreck.
NYU researchers embarrassingly moved to retract a examine about on-the-job violence MTA employees face as a result of a survey of employees was publicly posted on Fb — and trolls could have participated.
The retraction request — introduced final week in a mea culpa by NYU — calls into query the Biden administration-funded examine’s stunning conclusion that almost 90% of New York Metropolis’s public-facing subway and bus employees mentioned they had been assaulted or harassed.
The examine’s lead investigator Robyn Gershon despatched MTA officers a letter final week — which The Publish has obtained — that mentioned researchers discovered “anomalies” within the information, together with phony ZIP Codes offered by these surveyed.
“We realized {that a} hyperlink to our on-line survey had sadly been posted to a public Fb web page on January 2, 2024—an motion was not permitted as a part of our analysis—and we imagine this allowed mischievous respondents into the database,” Gershon wrote.
“We additionally decided that our survey didn’t have safeguards in place to make sure that it was solely taken by New York Metropolis transit employees, who had been despatched the survey by way of e-mail,” Gershon added.
“In mild of this, now we have concluded that the database was doubtless contaminated and that the veracity of the information from the time of the Fb posting on January 2, 2024 shouldn’t be verifiable.”
MTA officers had blasted the analysis as flawed when it was printed in August, arguing it was “no examine in any respect” and contending it solely served to stir panic.
Demetrius Crichlow, who has since been appointed New York Metropolis Transit’s president, countered the claims saying that inside MTA information confirmed 11% of its workforce had been assaulted or harassed — a not-insignificant proportion however nonetheless a far cry from the overwhelming majority claimed by the NYU examine.
“To be clear, we don’t dispute that incidents of assault and harassment occur — they do,” he wrote. “The MTA tracks circumstances carefully and every is despicable.”
MTA officers have efficiently pressed lawmakers to make attacking transit employees a felony.
One such sufferer of transit violence is MTA employee Mohammad Quader, who mentioned he nonetheless suffers on-the-job panic assaults after a December 2022 assault during which a hooligan bludgeoned him within the head with a hammer-like device.
“It’s occurring virtually on daily basis,” Quader beforehand informed The Publish. “Most of them are unreported.”
Crichlow argued that NYU’s analysis was skewed and tainted by amassing volunteer-based responses.
NYU spokeswoman Rachel Harrison mentioned the examine’s researchers now agree their on-line safeguards had been insufficient.
“The researchers concluded — based mostly on the survey’s vulnerability to responses from bots and/or folks aside from the meant recipients — that their information had been compromised,” she wrote.
The researchers proactively requested the Journal of City Well being to retract the examine, and have notified the federal Nationwide Institutes of Well being — which funded it — and NYU’s analysis oversight teams in regards to the issues, Harrison’s assertion reads.
Harrison didn’t return a request for additional remark.
MTA officers, in response to a request for remark, directed The Publish to Crichlow’s August letter.
Supply hyperlink
