In his 2020 ESR article, Arun Frey analysed data on ethnic violence that he web-scraped from a chronicle of hostile incidents against refugees, published by a German charitable foundation and a non-profit organization. He finds remarkable and supposedly causal effects of the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in 2015/2016 on anti-refugee violence. We argue that it is invalid to draw conclusions regarding the effects of the New Year’s Eve event due to simultaneous alterations in the way the data have been collected. We review the changes in data reporting which took place at the beginning of 2016 on the level of the German government and discuss the lack of a remarkable New Year’s effect when focussing on data which has not been affected by these changes. This casts doubt on the previous findings proposed by Frey (2020). We conclude with a general word of caution.

中文翻译：

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不是科隆，而是数据收集（可能已经）改变了一切：关于忽视社会学研究中数据记录变化的警示故事

阿伦·弗雷 (Arun Frey) 在 2020 年 ESR 文章中分析了他从德国一家慈善基金会和一家非营利组织出版的针对难民的敌对事件编年史中从网络上抓取的种族暴力数据。他发现 2015/2016 年除夕夜的性侵犯事件对反难民暴力产生了显着的因果影响。我们认为，由于数据收集方式同时发生变化，对除夕事件的影响得出结论是无效的。我们回顾了2016年初德国政府层面数据报告的变化，并讨论了在关注未受这些变化影响的数据时缺乏显着的新年效应。这让人对 Frey (2020) 先前提出的研究结果产生怀疑。