Here is an article about the 2004 Lancet Report, an article that indicts our media for their complicity in Bush's war crimes:
Published on Thursday, January 27, 2005 by Doug Ireland
Why U.S. Media Dismissed the Lancet Study of 100,000 Iraqi Civilian Dead
by Doug Ireland The Chronicle of Higher Education today has a top-drawer article about the researchers from Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities who published the study in the British medical journal The Lancet suggesting there were 100,000 Iraqi civilian dead from the war and the occupation. Lila Guterman, the article's author, notes that, "On the eve of a contentious presidential election -- fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq -- many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines."
The Chronicle article recounts in detail the methdology used for the study's 8000 interviews, in which 30 homes in each of 33 neighborhoods all over Iraq were visited. And other statisticins confirm the validity of the Lancet study's methdology: "Scientists say the size of the survey was adequate for extrapolation to the entire country. 'That's a classical sample size,' says Michael J. Toole, head of the Center for International Health at the Burnet Institute, an Australian research organization. Researchers typically conduct surveys in 30 neighborhoods, so the Iraq study's total of 33 strengthens its conclusions. 'I just don't see any evidence of significant exaggeration,' he says.
The researchers, including Johns Hopkins' Les Roberts--whose previous mortality statistics of conflicts had been used as fact by both the State Department and the U.N.--were particularly shocked by their findings in Fallujah:
"The Fallujah data were chilling: 53 deaths had taken place in the study's 30 households there since the invasion commenced, on March 19, 2003. In the other 32 neighborhoods combined, the researchers had counted 89 deaths. While 21 of the deaths elsewhere were attributable to violence, in Fallujah 52 of the 53 deaths were due to violence.
"The number of deaths in Fallujah was so much higher than in other locations that the researchers excluded the data from their overall estimate as a statistical outlier. Because of that, Mr. Roberts says, chances are good that the actual number of deaths caused by the invasion and occupation is higher than 100,000.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0127-23.htm As this current article on the 2006 Lancet report, the Bush regime and its apologists will do everything they can to discredit the report, short of submitting solid evidence to counter its findings:
Published on October 12, 2006 by the Guardian / UK
This Terrible Misadventure Has Killed One in 40 Iraqis
The government will do all it can to discredit the latest estimate of civilian casualties since the invasion: 650,000
by Richard Horton Many people refused to believe the Lancet report in 2004 from a group of American and Iraqi public-health scientists who surveyed homes across the country and found that about 100,000 additional Iraqi deaths had taken place since the coalition invasion in March 2003. Several government ministers were deployed to destroy the credibility of the findings and, in large part, they succeeded. But now their denials have come back to haunt them, for the figures from Iraq have been confirmed by a further study.
The same team from Johns Hopkins University worked with Iraqi doctors to visit over 1,800 homes in Iraq, selected randomly to make sure that no bias could creep in to their calculations.
They identified more than 12,000 family members and tracked those who had died over an interval that spanned both pre- and post-invasion periods. The Iraqi interviewers spoke fluent English as well as Arabic, and they were well trained to collect the information they were seeking. They asked permission from every family to use the data they wanted. And they chased down death certificates in over four out of five cases to make sure that they had a double check on the numbers and causes of death given to them by family members.
All of these checks and balances mean that the 650,000 additional Iraqi casualties they report since the invasion is the most reliable estimate we have of civilian deaths. Most of these deaths have been of men aged 15 to 44.
Not only do we have a better understanding of the toll our invasion has had on the country; we also understand better just how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is our occupation and our continued presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence. Claims that the terrorist threat was always there are simply disproved by these findings.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1012-21.htm Cluster samplingThis is what Allan Bluman says about cluster sampling in his Statistics textbook,
Elementary Statistics.
Cluster sampling is used when the population is large or when it involves subjects residing in a large geographic area. For example, if one wanted to do a study involving the patiens in the hospitals in New York City, it would be very costly and time-consuming to try to obtain a random sample of patients since they would be spread over a large area. Instead, a few hospitals could be selected at random, and the patients in these hospitals would be interviewed in a cluster.
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