chaddukes wrote:Whoa! You can't trust the Wall Street Journal to be impartial.
Here an excerpt from the opinionjournal article citing problems with the sampling:
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.
And:
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.
And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it--try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions.
The relatively few cluster points used are already reflected in the report by the extraordinarily large margin of error reported, well in excess of a 100,000 deaths. This renders the report inadequate for many purposes, but for establishing the death count as at least at the bottom of the range (approaching six hundred thousand) it is a sound instrument, as Zogy and other organizations have found. A greater number of clusters would have narrowed the range, rendering the report more accurate, but would have had the effect of only lowering the highest number of the range or raising the lower. It could not have done both.
The report is weak in that it has a very large margin of error and does not report a more precise count; but it is also very accurate in relation to what it does report. The report reflects only Iraqi dead, which was established by asking "demographic" questions. You cite a second hand report of an underling supposedly saying no demographic questions as credible, which it is not, and then give credence to the same bozo who might have wanted the Hopkins people to ask the grieving Iraqi families their incomes as a means of determining whether or not their dead are counted. Absolutely ridiculous.
You simply are in denial, as are a lot of people who still can't quite look squarely at how they were fooled into doing what they have done.
Scared America got drunk on Bush and swerved into the coming lane, killing maybe a million people, more than half of them children, and many of them its own..
