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30037: Pershing (reply) Re: 30031: Morse (ask) Lancet Study (fwd)




From: tjpershing@aol.com

The Lancet study was done with a methodology that produces statistically surprising #'s, the same methodology that produced the highest #'s for Iragi civilian casualties and deaths during the US occupation. As social science it appears to be a solid system- but it still relies on the responses of the interviewed with no collaborating evidence- and this may be its fault line- as has been established in other methodologies it doesn't take long for a person to see what kind of answer the interviewer is looking for and follow the natural human tendency of exaggerating or fabricating to "please" the interviewer. I have not seen the questionnaire so I don't know if the questions on violence were masked by other general questions, such as opinions of governance, schooling, health etc. to throw off this tendency.

In the end, the numbers people used in reports were statistical averages drawn from a wide range of possible levels- all based on a very few number of actual responses projected across the PaP region- at that level the effect described above could have played into the very high purely statistical projections produced. I say this because in talking with and looking at reports from all manner of other groups the Lancet study appeared high- it therefore needs to be scrutinized because if it is accurate its a bombshell-

Unfortunately, it appears the authors missed a good chance of answering this question by running a parallel study of the two year time period before Aristides departure- which would have at least given us a percentage of change in these events regardless of the levels of statistical projections.

As for the Authors duplicitous use of footnoting her own work under a different name and hiding her previous affiliations from readers of the report and the Lancet- this is a big social science no-no, and put in doubt so much of what still might turn out to be an important study.

I suggest a social scientist with no previous association with Haiti reweiw the methodology and re-run the study with no outside interference-