29179: Chin (reply) RE: 29128: Kondrat (response) re: Simidor (29138) and Dailey (29139) "critiques" of Lancet study (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

> From Elizabeth Chin (ejc@oxy.edu)


I appreciated greatly Kondrat's clear and substantive discussion of the
Lancet study and its methods.  I too read the study in its entirety and
found little to argue with, unless one wants to take the stance that the
data were invented.  If anything, as Kondrat points out, most of the
'flaws' in the study err on the side of under-reporting violence, on the
part of all players.  One flaw that I found perhaps more powerful than
others was that the gender of the responding householder seems not to
have been taken into account.  To better understand the strength of the
data generated on sexual assault of women and children, it would be
important to know what proportion of respondents were women and men; men
are likely to under-report violence against women either because they
don't know such acts have taken place or because they are perpetrators
and don't care to report their own violations. Moreover, assaults
against children are the most likely to be underreported, for a variety
of reasons, not the least of them being that resident adults may not
even know that such assaults have taken place.

It certainly was a mistake, however, for Kolbe/Duff not to disclose her
name change and prior affiliations at the outset and in my view her
failure to do so is a serious breach of ethics. She absolutely should
have anticipated that her decision not to disclose her name change would
lead to exactly the brouhaha that has resulted.  The unfortunate result
is that the study appears to have been submitted with at least a
misleading intention and this casts a pall over the study itself.
Thinking more deviously, maybe this is exactly what she wanted -- after
all, as the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity and
the episode has given the study much more play than it already had.