Skip to content

Explore Courses | Elder Research | Contact | LMS Login

Statistics.com Logo
  • Courses
    • See All Courses
    • Calendar
    • Intro stats for college credit
    • Faculty
    • Group training
    • Credit & Credentialing
    • Teach With Us
  • Programs/Degrees
    • Certificates
      • Analytics for Data Science
      • Biostatistics
      • Programming For Data Science – Python (Experienced)
      • Programming For Data Science – Python (Novice)
      • Programming For Data Science – R (Experienced)
      • Programming For Data Science – R (Novice)
      • Social Science
    • Undergraduate Degree Programs
    • Graduate Degree Programs
    • Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
  • Partnerships
    • Higher Education
    • Enterprise
  • Resources
    • About Us
    • Blog
    • Word Of The Week
    • News and Announcements
    • Newsletter signup
    • Glossary
    • Statistical Symbols
    • FAQs & Knowledge Base
    • Testimonials
    • Test Yourself
Menu
  • Courses
    • See All Courses
    • Calendar
    • Intro stats for college credit
    • Faculty
    • Group training
    • Credit & Credentialing
    • Teach With Us
  • Programs/Degrees
    • Certificates
      • Analytics for Data Science
      • Biostatistics
      • Programming For Data Science – Python (Experienced)
      • Programming For Data Science – Python (Novice)
      • Programming For Data Science – R (Experienced)
      • Programming For Data Science – R (Novice)
      • Social Science
    • Undergraduate Degree Programs
    • Graduate Degree Programs
    • Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
  • Partnerships
    • Higher Education
    • Enterprise
  • Resources
    • About Us
    • Blog
    • Word Of The Week
    • News and Announcements
    • Newsletter signup
    • Glossary
    • Statistical Symbols
    • FAQs & Knowledge Base
    • Testimonials
    • Test Yourself
Student Login

Blog

Home Blog Curbstoning

Curbstoning

Curbstoning, to an established auto dealer, is the practice of unlicensed car dealers selling cars from streetside, where the cars may be parked along the curb.  With a pretense of being an individual selling a car on his or her own, and with no fixed location, such dealers avoid the fixed costs and regulations that burden regular used car dealers, and, in the eyes of the dealers, constitute unfair competition.  Hence the numerous web sites touting the honesty and fair deals you get from your neighborhood used car dealer, and warning you against the allure of curbstoners.

To a statistician, curbstoning means something completely different – it is the practice of fabricating survey data on the part of interviewers.  Sometimes it is done to speed the work – an interviewer might simply sit at a desk (or, in the days when door-to-door surveys were the rule, on the curbstone) and fabricate 50 interviews in a small fraction of the time needed to actually find and talk to people. The Washington Statistical Society, together with the American Society of Public Opinion Research, held a session several years ago devoted to curbstoning. What motivations besides laziness may be at play?  How can statisticians detect it?

Perhaps the mother of all curbstones is the 2014 survey by Green and LaCour concerning attitudes towards gay people.  They found that if the surveyor stated that he or she was gay, and shared some personal information, the respondent was less likely to express negative views towards gay people.   The findings received a lot of publicity. Recently, though, additional researchers studied the actual data and found irregularities. Most of which fell in the category of “the data are too perfect.”  The sampling technique described by Green and LaCour was “snowball” sampling (see here for more information), which is prone to bias and high variance.

Green and LaCour’s opinion survey (using the “gay feeling thermometer,”) however, resembled the data in a different open-source survey far too closely – the distribution of opinion was nearly identical to that survey, in fact.  Moreover, the survey’s reported change in respondent opinion was nearly perfectly normally distributed – “not one response out of thousands deviated meaningfully from this [normal] distribution.” Normal distributions are useful constructs for statistical methodology, but normal distributions this perfect are almost never encountered in the real world (except in cases where the measurement instrument has been carefully tweaked and honed over the years to produce a normal distribution – like the SAT test).

The statistical evidence was soon followed by other evidence and, with the concurrence of Green, Science retracted the article on May 28.  LaCour has not agreed to the retraction.

Recent Posts

  • Oct 6: Ethical AI: Darth Vader and the Cowardly Lion
    /
    0 Comments
  • Oct 19: Data Literacy – The Chainsaw Case
    /
    0 Comments
  • Data Literacy – The Chainsaw Case
    /
    0 Comments

About Statistics.com

Statistics.com offers academic and professional education in statistics, analytics, and data science at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of instruction. Statistics.com is a part of Elder Research, a data science consultancy with 25 years of experience in data analytics.

 The Institute for Statistics Education is certified to operate by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV)

Our Links

  • Contact Us
  • Site Map
  • Explore Courses
  • About Us
  • Management Team
  • Contact Us
  • Site Map
  • Explore Courses
  • About Us
  • Management Team

Social Networks

Facebook Twitter Youtube Linkedin

Contact

The Institute for Statistics Education
2107 Wilson Blvd
Suite 850 
Arlington, VA 22201
(571) 281-8817

ourcourses@statistics.com

  • Contact Us
  • Site Map
  • Explore Courses
  • About Us
  • Management Team

© Copyright 2023 - Statistics.com, LLC | All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use

By continuing to use this website, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.

Accept