It’s an academic train wreck.
NYU researchers embarrassingly moved to retract a study about on-the-job violence MTA workers face because a survey of workers was publicly posted on Facebook — and trolls may have participated.
The retraction request — announced last week in a mea culpa by NYU — calls into question the Biden administration-funded study’s shocking conclusion that nearly 90% of New York City’s public-facing subway and bus workers said they were assaulted or harassed.
The study’s lead investigator Robyn Gershon sent MTA officials a letter last week — which The Post has obtained — that said researchers found “anomalies” in the data, including phony ZIP Codes provided by those surveyed.
“We learned that a link to our online survey had unfortunately been posted to a public Facebook page on January 2, 2024—an action was not approved as part of our research—and we believe this allowed mischievous respondents into the database,” Gershon wrote.
“We also determined that our survey did not have safeguards in place to ensure that it was only taken by New York City transit workers, who were sent the survey via email,” Gershon added.
“In light of this, we have concluded that the database was likely contaminated and that the veracity of the data from the time of the Facebook posting on January 2, 2024 is not verifiable.”
MTA officials had blasted the research as flawed when it was published in August, arguing it was “no study at all” and contending it only served to stir panic.
Demetrius Crichlow, who has since been appointed New York City Transit’s president, countered the claims saying that internal MTA data showed 11% of its workforce were assaulted or harassed — a not-insignificant proportion but still a far cry from the overwhelming majority claimed by the NYU study.
“To be clear, we do not dispute that incidents of assault and harassment happen — they do,” he wrote. “The MTA tracks cases closely and each is despicable.”
MTA officials have successfully pressed lawmakers to make attacking transit workers a felony.
One such victim of transit violence is MTA worker Mohammad Quader, who said he still suffers on-the-job panic attacks after a December 2022 assault in which a hooligan bludgeoned him in the head with a hammer-like tool.
“It’s happening almost every day,” Quader previously told The Post. “Most of them are unreported.”
Crichlow argued that NYU’s research was skewed and tainted by collecting volunteer-based responses.
NYU spokeswoman Rachel Harrison said the study’s researchers now agree their online safeguards were inadequate.
“The researchers concluded — based on the survey’s vulnerability to responses from bots and/or people other than the intended recipients — that their data were compromised,” she wrote.
The researchers proactively asked the Journal of Urban Health to retract the study, and have notified the federal National Institutes of Health — which funded it — and NYU’s research oversight groups about the problems, Harrison’s statement reads.
Harrison didn’t return a request for further comment.
MTA officials, in response to a request for comment, directed The Post to Crichlow’s August letter.