The Hissom closure in Oklahoma: errors and interpretation problems in Conroy et al. (2003)

We reviewed a Mental Retardation article by Conroy et al. (2003) on consumer outcomes following the closure of the Hissom Center in Oklahoma. In this article the authors misconstrued their 254 subjects, implying they are representative of the Hissom Focus Class while failing to account for 128 subjects included in an earlier analysis. We found the research to be seriously compromised by data collection problems and discrepancies between reported findings and those obtained when the analyses were replicated. Problems ranged from those that seriously compromise the findings (such as the sample) to other problems in basic data management, transcription, and analysis that, when taken together, compromise the integrity of the findings, lead to inappropriate interpretations, and give rise to misleading conclusions that do not follow from the data.