Gee, that sounds exactly like the same BS they pulled right before the election to achieve their fraudulent survey results.
Edit: Heh! I guess I should have read Betsy's final thoughts before I posted my 2¢ worth. But hey! I was right, so that saves me the trouble of searching out the answer.
***
But it doesn't seem to matter how questionable the results
are. What matters is to get a number out there that can
then be cited by the media and by Democratic politicians.
Who cares if it's accurate if it makes a good talking point?
That bogus survey of Iraq war dead
Betsy's Page
Steven Moore, who has been working in Iraq doing survey research, explains why that Johns Hopkins study that recently came out purporting to show that there have been 655,000 war dead as a result of the Iraq war is a methodologically bogus study. They took a few cluster samples and then, without any attempt to test and see if their cluster samples were a true representation of the entire population, went on to extrapolate this wildly inflated number.
<<< Curious about the kind of people who would have the chutzpah to claim to a national audience that this kind of research was methodologically sound, I contacted Johns Hopkins University and was referred to Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study. Dr. Roberts defended his 47 cluster points, saying that this was standard. I'm not sure whose standards these are.
Appendix A of the Johns Hopkins survey, for example, cites several other studies of mortality in war zones, and uses the citations to validate the group's use of cluster sampling. One study is by the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used 750 cluster points. Harvard's School of Public Health, in a 1992 survey of Iraq, used 271 cluster points. Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million.
When I pointed out these numbers to Dr. Roberts, he said that the appendices were written by a student and should be ignored. Which led me to wonder what other sections of the survey should be ignored.
With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.
Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census. >>>
When a researcher at a respected institution like Johns Hopkins issues a study so shot with basic methodological problems you have to wonder what was going on. Apparently, this same group came up with a similar study right before the 2004 election. They used 33 cluster points for that study compared to a United Nations Development Project study that used 2200 cluster points. And lo and behold, the Johns Hopkins group came up then with an estimate of 69,000 to 155,000 civilian deaths since the war began compared to the UN study which found 18,000-29,000 civilian deaths. Amazing what shoddy research techniques can do for your results. And the UN is certainly no apologist for the United States and had no incentive to underestimate their results.
But it doesn't seem to matter how questionable the results are. What matters is to get a number out there that can then be cited by the media and by Democratic politicians. Who cares if it's accurate if it makes a good talking point?
betsyspage.blogspot.com
opinionjournal.com |
