Scientists, as professionals, have a responsibility to self-regulate. However, whistleblowing is rare. We investigated scientists' infrequent disclosure of unethical behavior by studying their responses to scenarios describing unethical research acts and compared their responses to those of...

Background:It has become common practice to analyze randomized experiments using linear regression with covariates. Improved precision of treatment effect estimates is the usual motivation. In a series of important articles, David Freedman showed that this approach can be badly flawed. Recent...

In this artacle, we report the impact of an undergraduate class on AIDS at UCLA designed to alter students' attitudes about AIDS and their high risk behavior. By and large, the class had beneficial effects. However, the study also raises several important methodological issues that at this point...

There are over three decades of largely unrebutted criticism of regression analysis as practiced in the social sciences. Yet, regression analysis broadly construed remains for many the method of choice for characterizing conditional relationships. One possible explanation is that the existing...

The authors analyze death penalty charging data for Los Angeles County involving homicides from 1990 to 1994. The data were collected by the Los Angeles Times. This data set is one of the largest tabulations of homicide defendant data yet collected. A Bayesian logistic regression analysis is...

Forecasts of future dangerousness are often used to inform the sentencing decisions of convicted offenders. For individuals who are sentenced to probation or paroled to community supervision, such forecasts affect the conditions under which they are to be supervised. The statistical criterion...

David Freedman’s critique of causal modeling in the social and biomedical sciences was fundamental. In his view, the enterprise was misguided, and there was no technical fix. Far too often, there was a disconnect between what the statistical methods required and the substantive information...

In this article, the authors report on the development of a short screening tool that deputies in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department could use in the field to help forecast domestic violence incidents in particular households. The data come from more than 500 households to which...

Beginning with such famous cases as the Harrisburg conspiracy trial, the use of "scientific" jury selection has gained wide publicity and numerous advocates. Both profit and nonprofit organizations are increasingly offering such services for "good" causes and/or hard cash. Yet no rigorous...