Patterns of Means and Standard Deviations with Binary Variables: A Key to Detecting Fraudulent Research
Walter Richard Schumm · Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research · 2019
Heathers and his colleagues have proposed a variety of tests to detect inconsistencies in research data, including the GRIM, SPRITE, DEBIT, and RIVETS tests.Binary data are common in social science research, for such variables as male/female, rural/urban, white/nonwhite, or college educated/not college educated.However, the standard deviation for binary data is a direct mathematical function of the mean score.We show how standard deviations vary as a function of the mean and how the maximum possible standard deviation varies as a function of sample size for a mean of .50.Implications for detecting fraudulent data are discussed.