Fictitious Data in Drug Abuse Research

Abstract

The production of fictitious interviews in field studies of drug abuse has been suspected on any number of occasions, and many researchers in the drug field have caught their interviewers constructing such fraudulent data. In the current experiment, several sets of fictitious and real data were compared and statistical differences were observed. While the technique cannot detect individual fictitious interview schedules, it does have promise for detecting fraudulent data on a mass basis.