Psyche, Science, and Society

ORB Iraq mortality poll to be reexamined

September 21st, 2007

The British polling company, ORB, that reported that an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis had died from violence post-invasion has decided that their results might be affected by a sampling design that undersampled rural areas. They had taken the survey results off the front page of the Newsroon page for a while. Now it has returned to that page, with a press release announcing that they are conducting some additional surveys in rural areas.

Iraq Casualties Poll Update

ORB to conduct additional interviews in rural Iraq.

We have received a lot of interest in the recent ‘casualties’ poll that we carried out in conjunction with our local partners in Iraq - IIACSS. Our survey was carried out throughout Iraq and looked at the incidence of civilian deaths since 2003 - together with Iraqi’s views on the displacement of people.

As with many other activities in Iraq polling has its own restraints and it is simply too dangerous for interviewers to operate in some areas. Meanwhile local authorities prevent interviewers from working in certain towns and districts. This means that we cannot gather opinion from the more volatile areas but, at the same time we have, so far, also limited coverage in rural districts. Both of these factors mean that any estimate of deaths will remain just that - an estimate.

While, for obvious reasons, we cannot boost our representation of people living in Iraq’s most violent areas we have decided - following feedback from readers of our poll - to conduct a more extensive survey of rural areas to see how this may impact on our estimate. We are in the process of conducting additional interviews in rural areas of Iraq. Once this data has been verified and merged with our current data set we will post it here on the ORB.

As scientists, we await the release of these additional results. I also hope that ORB will post details on their sampling methodology and survey administration techniques. Like the Johns Hopkins studies, the ILCS, and others, we need to closely examine their methodology. While I take the Hopkins and ORB studies seriously as evidence that the death toll is in the many hundreds of thousands, as a scientist, and sometime survey researcher (albeit in a very different area), I know that estimates in a situation like Iraq are just that, estimates. I’d like to see their methodology to see how well they dealt with the various potential biases. If it stands up, the replication of the basic findings of the Hopkins study, that the mortality in Iraq is enormous, will immeasurably strengthen our case.
At the same time, as I teach my research methods students, we should be skeptical of studies that support our prior beliefs and subject them to the same critical examination that we do of studies which challenge our prior beliefs.

Entry Filed under: Iraq, Mortality, Research Methods, War and Peace