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Notes -
I think that's a bit of a fig leaf: the authors knew or should have known that the paper would be portrayed without full disclosure as to its limitations, including in its own abstract and in the UBC piece itself (which does only mentions that the study excluded "severe levels of substance use, alcohol use or mental health symptoms", but not that it excluded the long-term homeless). Neither mentions the further filtering to only the sheltered homeless, nor the loss to followups.
Summaries by nature can't include all details, but people writing studies know what will get left out, and should recognize when that's going to be highly dishonest.
((There are other problems: the use of two preregistered analysis that are the weakest for predictive power and least repeated in the news coverage ("subjective well-being and cognitive outcomes") followed by a mass of 'exploratory' analysis that are repeated heavily but also scream garden of forking paths, especially combined with the condition grouping and when the study power looks like this. In addition to the attrition before study criteria were applied, the cash group had vastly lower response rates (74% vs 95%) on the 1-month survey than the control group did, which probably didn't have a huge impact in the statistical analysis but doesn't seem to get mentioned in the main paper proper at all just in the appendix. I also don't have a good mental model for the impact of "In the main analyses, participants in the cash group were included in the final sample if they received the cash, while participants in the control group were only included if they completed at least one follow-up survey." but my gut check's that it's not a good sign combined with that extra 21% dropout rate for the 1-mo survey.))
Look at the other two portions of the study: the authors did a couple survey-style efforts specifically to form approaches to "frame the benefits of the cash transfer to make it more palatable to the public, with the goal of improving public support for a cash transfer policy". Which, in turn, again only mentions filtering for "severe level of substance use, alcohol use, or mental health challenges", without mentioning excluding the long-term homeless.
This is pretty standard! For a different sort of culture war issue, I'd point to this recent discussion about eating beef. There are, if you dig into it far enough, quite a lot of disclaimers about how this is really talking about 24-hour recall rather than any more holistic analysis of consumption, and inconveniently the study didn't actually ask about meat at all so instead the analysis was filtered through one database to make predictions for likely meat portion of self-reported food intake which still didn't say anything specific about beef so the authors further just cut everything that wasn't explicitly spelled out as one type of meat or another in half. It's all there, and unlike most bad actors in this space it's not even paywalled!
But ultimately, this study methodology still requires the author to look at (trash-quality) data claiming that X people consumed Y ounces of meat that the authors believed (for some reason?) was 50% beef, and that this was equivalent to X people consuming Y/2 ounces of beef individually. And while st_rev was responding to the NYPost, which one could quite plausibly expect to be unusually useless even by popsci standards, it's not like the popsci groups are doing any better.
These social scientists aren't morons, despite their best efforts. The people actively studying how best to frame the benefits of an intervention have to at least considered how they're going to describe the intervention. This doesn't even mean that the general thrust of these studies are wrong; they're all too underpowered to tell us that they're even lying, once you move the fig leaf. But that's pretty damning for the broader field of science.
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