By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
Dr. Niemiec’s Deeply Flawed Research
At a recent Colorado Parks and Wildlife meeting, newly-appointed CPW commissioner Dr. Niemiec produced an incredibly flawed study to help back up her motion regarding furbearer bag limits, a change in policy that was not on the agenda and for which there was no opportunity for comment by the public.
If you would like to read up on the meeting itself and a potential lawsuit, see an earlier newsletter linked first below.
Not too long after writing the earlier newsletter, a reader shared the Club 20 article (linked second below) providing some context and background on the work. In addition to encouraging you to read the piece, it provides a great excuse to follow up on the earlier newsletter.
The change in policy put forward by Niemiec was narrowly passed on a 6 – 5 vote. As support for her recommendation, Dr. Niemiec offered the study linked third below.
It’s likely impossible to ever know whether (and/or how much) Dr. Niemiec’s study influenced the vote. Per the Club 20 article, the study produced by Dr. Niemiec et. al. appears to not have been shared with CPW rank and file, and when said rank and file saw it, they criticized it.
This, plus my natural cynicism tell me that the study likely didn’t matter for the commission vote. The proposal and vote were likely choreographed and decided in advance, the study being merely something that they can all point to if called on their policy. The study is there to provide a little scientific sheen to the vote.
Nonetheless, looking at this study is important because it shows the kind of flawed scholarship Dr. Niemiec is producing at CSU and it is a reminder to you to not be cowed by someone with a PhD waving around academic studies. Sometimes the emperor really doesn’t wear clothes.
In simple terms, the study presents us with a survey done by Prolific, a group hired by Dr. Niemiec and her fellow researchers. Quoting from the study:
“We conducted a survey of 534 Colorado residents via Prolific. Prolific is an online survey data collection company which recruits individuals willing to participate in surveys on any number of different topics in exchange for some financial remuneration. We used sex and political affiliation as quotas to obtain a sample as demographically representative as possible from Prolific.”
If you would like to get more information on how Prolific gathers and curates its pool of paid-survey takers, I put a link to their “Participant Pool” page fourth below. In short, what it looks like to me is that Prolific is a company that offers you survey data while you wait.
Since a group of paid, and self-selected, individuals taking an online survey may not be the best representative sample for Colorado residents, the Dr. Niemic’s research group used a mathematical technique called “raking” or “iterative proportional fitting”. If you want to see this more in depth, I put a pretty approachable resource linked sixth below.
Skipping a lot of detail, raking takes survey responses from a group that doesn’t match your desired group characteristics and weights some answers more (or less) than others until the you have a stable set of results that matches as closely as possible to your desired group characteristics. As a quick example, if you want to have survey results from a group that is 25% Republican, but your data is actually only 15% Republican respondents, you downweight Democrat responses you got (make them count for less) and upweight (make them louder) the Republican responses.
As you might imagine, this introduces some note of artificiality into the results. This would be, by the way, another artificiality introduced on top of the one for having paid, self-selected respondents.
Screenshot 1 shows the comments the researchers had about their sample as well as Data Table 1 which summarizes the pre- and post-raking demographics.
Note something important here with regard to views on hunting, etc. that is completely and utterly missing (and is not acknowledged in Dr. Niemiec’s work): geography. There was no mention of any weighting or even attempt to find out the rural/urban split for the survey respondents.
There’s one last thing to mention about the survey before wrapping up. Prior to being asked any questions at all, respondents were given the preamble you see in screenshot 2 attached, from the study.
Survey responses are highly sensitive to what you ask and how you ask it. Ask people whether we should save the spotted mouse from extinction, many say yes. Ask whether someone should lose their job to save it, you get fewer yes answers. Ask whether you personally would be willing to save the animal if you lost your home or job, the yes answers plummet.
Read this preamble. Ask yourself if you think that responses would vary if it were never read. Ask yourself if you think responses would vary if the mention of how some (not all) animals were caught were left out or changed. Ask yourself if you think responses would change if respondents were told about states with no bag limits, or if they were told just how few furbearers were killed a year in Colorado.
The language in this preamble is there to prime the pump.
The lack of scholarship displayed in this research is startling. I would be embarrassed to have my name on this as a display of what I was capable of. CSU should be embarrassed for housing efforts like these.
I hope that whoever funded this (the paper itself says the effort was funded by an anonymous donor) feels like they got their money’s worth. I’d bet you my lunch that whoever funded it smiled when the vote by CPW came in; perhaps it’s not all they wanted, but it’s a step that way.
What I hope you get from this study and from this post is an appreciation of how research can be bent to an agenda. I hope you take away a sense that simply putting the imprimatur of an institution on something, simply having the letters PhD following someone’s name doesn’t automatically grant research legitimacy.
Sometimes it’s just shilling for a cause.
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/pushback-on-the-idea-of-food-deserts?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
https://club20foundation.org/2026/08/csus-furbearer-study-was-published-one-day-before-cpw-commission-decision/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTpx9twZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5RHn-nMgkBuO1urLhIFEaz744yrXXWONBnpj3fAoTMuoB_ztxvXcKSEj4vnQ_aem_R0KB-fU_2-PUhVkk8frQ8w
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14iBnLR6M63EgW0eWcymkcDeSPgAG_afX/view
https://www.prolific.com/participant-pool
https://stevenpeutz.com/ipf-survey-weights/
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.