(MENAFN) The Florida Standard recently reported that Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart has resigned amidst an investigation into allegations of data falsification in multiple studies. These accusations suggest that Stewart may have inflated the prevalence of racism in the United States by manipulating data to support his claims.
Stewart, who is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology, first faced public allegations of falsifying data in 2019. Justin Pickett, a criminology professor at the University of Albany, accused Stewart of making misleading changes to data used in a 2011 paper the two co-authored.
The study in question, titled "Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment," proposed a correlation between the size of minority populations in a community and an increased public desire for harsher sentences for black and Hispanic offenders. However, the actual data showed no such relationship, and in fact, the opposite may be true.
In recent developments, Pickett has revealed that Stewart doubled the sample size while leaving out nearly three-quarters of the counties surveyed. This manipulation of data rendered the results incoherent, and Stewart has been accused of refusing to turn over raw data for further analysis.
The allegations against Stewart raise serious concerns about the validity of his research and the potential impact on policies and practices based on his conclusions. It is imperative that academic institutions take allegations of data falsification seriously to maintain the integrity and credibility of scientific research.
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