A Florida State University criminology professor was under investigation after six of his studies were taken down for containing fabricated data
Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart has quietly resigned after a month-long absence amid an investigation into whether he falsified data in multiple studies to inflate the prevalence of racism in the United States. United, the Florida Standard reported last week.
A fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Stewart was first publicly accused of data tampering in 2019 by the co-author of one of his studies, University of Albany criminology professor Justin Pickett, who claimed that Stewart made several misleading changes to the numbers in their 2011 article “Ethnic Threat and Social Control: Examining Public Support for the Judicial Use of Ethnicity in Punishment” just before publication.
The published study claimed that the public’s desire for harsher sentences for black and Hispanic offenders increased in proportion to the size of minority populations in a community. However, the study data showed that such a relationship does not exist and that the opposite may even be true. Pickett revealed that his colleague doubled the size of the quarter while leaving out nearly three of the counties surveyed, mutilating the data to inconsistency, and said Stewart refused to hand over the raw data so Pickett could redo the calculations himself.
That study and four others were later withdrawn, but when Pickett tried to bring the matter to the university’s attention, he claimed he faced four months of stonewalling. When the school finally mounted an investigation, the three-person panel in charge included two people who had co-authored studies with Stewart, violating the state of Florida’s conflict of interest policy. Unsurprisingly, this investigation claimed that it had not found enough evidence of fraud and advised against further investigation.
Pickett told the Florida Standard that co-worker cover-ups are common in the field, explaining “there is a huge financial incentive to falsify data and there is no accountability. If you do that, the likelihood of you getting caught is so, so low.
Stewart, who is black, complained at college that Pickett – who is white – had “Essentially lynched [him] And [his] academic background. »
In 2020, a sixth article authored by Stewart was taken down – but not before being cited by 186 other articles. Another investigation found enough merit in the fraud allegations to prosecute them, apparently jeopardizing Stewart’s $190,000-a-year position. Florida State declined to discuss the matter with the Florida Standard, and Stewart’s profile is still online on the university’s website.
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