Earlier this month, an NYU researcher retracted a study — which reported that 89% of surveyed MTA employees experienced assault or harassment while at work during the COVID-19 pandemic — from the Journal of Urban Health due to compromised survey data.
GPH professor and lead researcher Robyn Gershon wrote that the online survey was published on a public Facebook page in January, allowing non-MTA workers and “mischievous respondents into the database,” in a Nov. 8 letter to the New York City Transit president obtained by WSN. In a public statement, NYU spokesperson Rachel Harrison said researchers received “numerous responses” from zip codes outside of the area, prompting them to investigate the data.
“It is paramount in science that we identify any questionable data, immediately report and retract it, and inform all pertinent parties,” Gershon said in a statement to WSN. “Going forward, we have implemented much more stringent security measures to prevent this from happening again.”
GPH researchers partnered with Yale University and Loyola University professors to collect over 1,200 survey responses from December 2023 to February 2024, assessing how MTA workers experienced harassment during the COVID-19 pandemic. They found that among the 89% who reported harassment, 48.6% reported physical assault and 48.7% reported verbal harassment. Study authors acknowledged limitations to its research methods in the August report, such as relying on self-reported accounts, and called for more detailed data on victimization among MTA workers.
Gershon told WSN that the survey link was posted on the Transport Workers Union Local 100’s social media account, resulting in the data’s contamination. The union, which represents public transportation workers, had sent the survey to its over 20,000 members with verified email addresses. The New York City Transit president, Demetrius Crichlow, had previously criticized NYU and the TWU for the incident, which he called a ploy to “attack the NYPD and stir panic.”
The retracted study was one of several funded by a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to GPH researchers and the TWU Local 100 in 2021 to research the pandemic’s impact on MTA workers. Gershon had said that she aimed to use the funding to create a method to protect transit workers’ health that could apply to other essential workers.
“Online surveys in general are increasingly a target of security breaches and that is the real story,” Gershon told WSN. “We have to stay one step ahead of them.”
Contract Vasily Belousov at [email protected].
