Men's Rights/4chan raid on a college's sexual assault reporting page gets mixed results in /r/mensrights. "Before you guys get your underwear in a bunch, it may help to actually read the fucking document." Popcorn throughout. (np.reddit.com)
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85 ups - 37 downs = 48 votes
100 comments submitted at 18:11:57 on Dec 17, 2013 by KettleChipz1
> People who try to collect statistics about things we don't know
Where does the reporting page mention anything about collecting statistics?
"This form should be used by members of the Occidental College community who have experienced or have been witness to sexual violence (sexual assault, rape or sexual battery). The information will be used to identify and address troubling trends."
Quoted in the linked comment.
Right, but a statistic is not the same thing as a trend.
"Lots of men are wearing kipper ties this season" = trend
"8 out of 10 men we interviewed said they wear kipper ties on a regular basis" = statistic.
Of course, a statistic can be taken to infer the existence of a trend, but they're not the same thing.
Let's say (hypothetically speaking) out of 100 occasions the form was submitted, 10 contained claims of being raped by a man with a moustache and glasses. What kind of statistical information could you glean from that? You could glean the statistic that 10% of the time the form was submitted, it contained claims of being raped by a man with a moustache and glasses. What kind of trend could you infer from that statistic? You could infer a trend of an individual or individuals unknown, submitting the form with a claim of being raped by a man with a moustache and glasses. Nothing more, and nothing less.
As a tool for gathering statistics, the form would suffer from the following defects:
Self-selecting sample, totally uncontrolled use of the form (anyone who has internet access can fill it out)
Unverified, unreliable data (no-one has any way of knowing if any of the data collected by the form is accurate or true)
That's why I mentioned statistics. The people who set up the page said nothing about collating responses from the form into any kind of dataset, and there wouldn't be much point in them trying. All they could measure is the use of the form, not the level or type of sexual assault that is actually ocurring. Since the form is so open to abuse, it has little or no value for research.
Bullshit.
A statistic is a function of data. You have your data in the form of reports, therefore you can create statistics. It's not a controlled longitudinal study of assaults on this campus, but it's extremely valuable for research, especially considering the nature of the data that you're collecting in the first place. (remember one of the reasons for the form is people often don't report sexual assault in the first place)
> Self-selection bias is the problem that very often results when survey respondents are allowed to decide entirely for themselves whether or not they want to participate in a survey. [...] In most instances, self-selection will lead to biased data
http://srmo.sagepub.com/view/encyclopedia-of-survey-research-methods/n526.xml
I'm well aware of self-selection bias. That doesn't make this data worth "little to no value for research" (your words) -- it just means that you have to know what you can and cannot do with the data.
OK, what could you do with the data? What kind of statistics could you derive from it? How would you know those statistics were sufficiently accurate or reliable?
[As an extreme (but actually plausible, given the openess of the form) example, what would you do if 5% of respondents reported being raped by an alien? What then? Are you going to send out an alien-hunting posse? The form's usefulness as either a reporting or research tool is severely limited, precisely because it is so open to such 'crack-pot' claims.]
With the data on its own:
You could then use the data that was gathered in combination with other data to:
>As an extreme (but actually plausible, given the openess of the form) example
Lying takes effort and most people are lazy (and most students probably wouldn't want to risk their education by abusing a service aimed at helping crime victims)
Yeah, emphasis on those last few, lol. Because you wouldn't know if a damn word of your dataset was the least bit true or accurate.Those reports could contain literally anything. Completely unsubstantiated self reports.
As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out".
The majority of crime records are self-reported. Census data is often self-reported. Many (if not most) surveys are self-reported.