
A better way to gauge how common sexual assault is on college campuses - diamondcutter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/10/15/a-better-way-to-gauge-how-common-sexual-assault-is-on-college-campuses/
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danso
The statistical hypothesis in the OP seems sound...for those of you who've had
to pitch studies like these and apply for funding (on any topic)...does the
institutional reluctance to fund these studies scale disproportionately to the
proposed cost per participant and total possible participants?

i.e. is it easier to convince the university/funder to do a study that could
potentially connect with 6,000 students at just $5 a piece, versus a study
that, at most, could reach 600 students at $50 a piece?

edit: My guess is -- yes, that it is easier to convince people, even at the
university level, with nicer sounding numbers even if competing proposals add
up to the same cost, even if the cheaper/broader-sounding proposal is
scientifically less valid, because in general, people have difficulty with
numerical reasoning. I mean, the OP felt the need (and may have been asked to
by the WaPo editor) to describe cross-multiplication, something we all were
supposed to have learned in elementary school:

> _But even if the response rate is not 100 percent, it allows us to place a
> lower bound on how many students have been assaulted. For example, if 90
> percent of students respond to the survey, and 20 percent of them say they
> have been assaulted, we can infer that at least 90 percent x 20 percent = 18
> percent of students have been assaulted, even if none of the students who
> failed to respond were._

~~~
akiselev
My experience is in biology/medical research not the social sciences, and I
worked with a well known PI, so grain of salt and all that, but I have rarely
found the operational specifics of the grant application to matter because the
people at the NSF/NIH are rarely qualified to evaluate experiments and their
scientific calidity on that level. Assuming we're not talking absurd cost
differences (like a $200 thousand exploratory experiment vs a $10 million pre-
clinical trial), then being able to hype the potential benefits of your
research, having good political standing in your university/field, and having
a well known name involved is far more important.

Grants are sort of like college admissions at Harvard or Yale. There are about
five to ten times too many qualified applicants than there are available
opportunities and as a result the "best of the best" group, whose members are
practically indistinguishable from each other, essentially becomes a random
lottery pool for the available spots.

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artnep
The more serious problem with these studies is that the definition of sexual
assault is often unclear and constantly changing. What's classified as sexual
assault by some definitions would be considered by others to be "boys being a
bit too pushy because they don't know any better".

~~~
gluelogic
The debate around sexual assaults on university campuses today seems to be a
frontier for identity politics/gender warfare, and I am worried that this will
have a dangerous, harmful kind of fall out.

~~~
malandrew
I also suspect that the identity politics and gender warfare is conditioning
people to consider certain acts to be assault that absent the conditioning
would not have been viewed as assault previously.

You can see this in societies that value "honor" where culturally people take
offense and feel victimized or disrespected by statements or actions that
would be inconsequential in another culture.

For example, while the actual prevalence is hard if not impossible to measure,
it's not uncommon to hear about incidents of "sexual assault" where the the
victim determined/concluded (for whatever reason) that what transpired was
sexual assault after the terminus of the act. These cases of sexual assault
are qualitatively different than acts where the victim is cognizant during the
act that the act is assault and unwelcome, and makes that known to the
assailant in non-ambiguous terms verbally or through resistance.

The trickiest cases are those where the "victim" is intoxicated (but most
likely both parties are intoxicated and both may be making poor decisions) and
the following day determines it was assault. These examples, when they happen,
illustrate the impact of cultural conditioning to how people perceive such
events. In our society today, when someone has intercourse with someone who
when sober they consider sexually undesirable, we condition men and women to
perceive such an event differently. Men are conditioned to view sleeping with
someone that they wouldn't sleep with sober as an poor decision and to brush
it off as a mistake ("keep on keeping on"). In prior decades, women generally
viewed such encounters the same way as men do ("Ugg, I fucked up. I should
have drunk as much and shouldn't have slept with him"). Today, however, the
identity politics and gender warfare happening on college campuses are
teaching women to instead have the reaction "He took advantage of me when I
was drunk. I'm a victim and have been assaulted" (despite the fact that that
other person was probably intoxicated as well).

What's most unfortunate about such conditioning of one gender to view
themselves as a victim after the fact in ambiguous situations is that it
delegitimizes real claims of assault and leads society to question and doubt
that sexual assault occurred in situations that are unambiguous. Getting drunk
and sleeping with someone and regretting it the next day and claiming rape is
an insult and disservice to those people who actually are sexual assaulted
against their will.

I would be nice if we didn't use an ambiguous catch all term like sexual
assault and instead used a variety very specific terms for the different acts
that people currently lump under sexual assault. People who get drunk and
sleep with someone they regret sleeping with should not be using the same term
to describe what happened as someone who is attacked and forcefully penetrated
while walking late at night or someone who is sent to prison and victimized
physically by another prisoner.

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abarrettjo
Interestingly, the University of Virginia recently required all of its
students to complete a sexual assault awareness module lasting many hours.
(This module had both educational components and survey components.) It likely
had a 100% response rate, as failure to complete would lock students out of
collab, which is necessary to obtain and submit class assignments.

So UVA is currently compiling what is likely to be a complete and deep set of
data, and I am very interested to see what they do with it.

~~~
slipjack
Do you have any links about the project? I'd be really interested to know
more.

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omginternets
>Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem, but it is difficult to study
accurately.

Except that it isn't (insofar as "serious problem" is a weasel-phrase that's
used to imply high incidence).

It should go without saying that one rape is too many, but overwhelming
evidence points towards a consequential and artificial inflation of numbers.

A good overview of the subject:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/colle...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html)

~~~
diamondcutter
Did you read the stats in the original post?

"Surveys with high response rates also imply that sexual assault is a serious
problem. The Michigan study found that 12 percent of undergraduate women had
experienced non-consensual penetration within the past year; the Stanford
survey found that 12 percent had experienced attempted or completed non-
consensual penetration since arriving at Stanford; the Department of Justice
found that 3 percent had experienced rape or attempted rape within the last 7
months."

Is your claim that those numbers are not high, or that those numbers are
somehow unreliable even though the surveys have high response rates?

~~~
omginternets
My claim is that campus rape is (probably) not a serious problem in terms of
incidence. The implication in my statement is that the phrase "serious
problem", in this context, is generally used to imply that campus rape has
reached epidemic proportions. There is much evidence to the contrary, as
mentioned in the article.

~~~
spacemanmatt
Seems like you didn't read the article.

~~~
omginternets
No, I did. It seems like you're missing my point, which is that the authors of
this article are referring to absurd and dishonest rhetoric _despite_ not
adhering to that view.

I get that they're not in support of the idea that campus rape is an epidemic,
and I also get that my gripe is minor.

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slipjack
> Many universities in the AAU survey offered 6,000 students > $5 each to fill
> out the survey, yielding a total potential > cost of $30,000. But if you
> were willing to pay $30,000, it > would be far better to pay 600 randomly
> selected students > $50 — a $200 hourly rate for a 15-minute survey, giving
> > students a much larger incentive to respond.

This is a good reminder of how important study design is, not just the
questions on the survey.

The only worry I have is the tiny sample size one would get of
underrepresented minorities, which in other studies have been show to have a
much higher victimization rate than other groups.

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sandworm101
While at school I needed to do a survey of law students, a rather apathetic
bunch. I said "20$ will be paid to the 25th and 50th respondents." I got a 75%
response rate within days. And #50 never claimed her prize. Rewards goes
further if respondents think they are in some form of competition.

~~~
KingMob
True, but that was still a biased sample, in that the non-responding 25%
probably differs from the other 75% (motivation, wealth/monetary sensitivity).
Estimating a mean depends only on sample size, not population size, which is
how a random sampling of 600 people always trumps a biased sample of 6000.
E.g., "Dewey defeats Truman".

