The true ratio is probably somewhere between 0.76 and 0.38
Before starting to speak of the true ratio, you really should examine your data source a bit more carefully.
Your link leads to a non-academic article which quotes numbers from opinion surveys and there’s little information on those. In particular, the question of how representative their data sample was is kinda important. To make an obvious observation, people living in big cities probably (correctly) fear crime more than people living in rural communities. Therefore the reported average fear of crime will be greatly affected by how urbanized your sample is.
Another point is that your Table 2 does not give numbers about people who worry about rape. It gives numbers about people who worry about “yourself or someone in your family getting sexually assaulted or raped” (emphasis mine). And “sexual assault” is a fuzzy term which might, depending on who and how you ask, include things like catcalls and leery glances. And boyfriends. Plus, to continue my example, probably every parent with a teenage daughter answered “pretty frequently” to this question.
P.S. Also the numbers are from 1993. The overall crime rate in the US has dropped hugely since then.
Yes, I’m aware that these sources are far from perfect. I just did a quick google search and threw out the the first numbers I could easily get my hands on, as a quick sanity-check. Obviously it’s far from a definitive answer.
You’re free to look for better data; I’ll probably do a little more poking around myself.
However I’ll give you my data-less biased priors :-)
I expect you to find some data. Much of it will be bad because it tends to be produced by Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and these people are not known for their statistical acumen or precision of analysis. Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published. Whatever remains (if anything) will show high variance and inconsistency.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don’t disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Well querying it in sample sizes that are much smaller and less random than even the shoddiest academic study is, by comparison, indeed “extremely flawed”.
I said this below as well, but it’s fairly well buried now so I’ll repeat it here for others’ benefit:
Your hypothesis that any research on fear of rape will be systematically biased towards the claim that the vast majority of women are frequently, distressingly afraid of rape is strongly contraindicated by the fact that the arbitrarily-chosen (i.e., they were open access) research sources I cited at the top of this thread support the opposite conclusion.
(To clarify: I really don’t care very much about this question and as such I’m content to just go along with the rough approximations that a couple of old surveys provided. If someone was actually trying to get a really good answer I would suggest they look further and deeper. Published research would probably be a good start; given what I’ve seen so far, your hypothesis that it’s systematically and hopelessly biased to the point of uselessness is not persuasive)
Um… the particular method you suggested is an extremely flawed research strategy. Especially considering that one of your complaints about the research linked by Vulture was that the sample may not be representative. I don’t know about you, but the women I know well do not constitute a particularly representative sample of women in general.
Describing your experiment as “directly querying the reality surrounding you” makes it sound pretty dandy, but if you actually look at the specifics of the experiment, it’s subject to a host of biases.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
More than that, a poll about fears is likely to have a pretty high false positive rate—just considering the question is likely to bring up a significant number of instances of anything you fear at all, and if it is phrased as generically as “often” with no definition?
Getting at the true numbers would require.. Uhm. No, asking people to monitor their fears would be Nigh-certain to make them much more fearful (“log thoughts of sex” has been tried. The results that came back were blatantly a case of “dont think of a pink elephant” coloring everything) and thus would be deeply unethical. I think the cleanest lift would be a large collection of extensive daily journals, or outright annotated lifelogs. That would probably make your subject pool more introspective than the general population, but it should not skew these specific numbers much. Expensive, however.
Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
Before starting to speak of the true ratio, you really should examine your data source a bit more carefully.
Your link leads to a non-academic article which quotes numbers from opinion surveys and there’s little information on those. In particular, the question of how representative their data sample was is kinda important. To make an obvious observation, people living in big cities probably (correctly) fear crime more than people living in rural communities. Therefore the reported average fear of crime will be greatly affected by how urbanized your sample is.
Another point is that your Table 2 does not give numbers about people who worry about rape. It gives numbers about people who worry about “yourself or someone in your family getting sexually assaulted or raped” (emphasis mine). And “sexual assault” is a fuzzy term which might, depending on who and how you ask, include things like catcalls and leery glances. And boyfriends. Plus, to continue my example, probably every parent with a teenage daughter answered “pretty frequently” to this question.
P.S. Also the numbers are from 1993. The overall crime rate in the US has dropped hugely since then.
Yes, I’m aware that these sources are far from perfect. I just did a quick google search and threw out the the first numbers I could easily get my hands on, as a quick sanity-check. Obviously it’s far from a definitive answer.
You’re free to look for better data; I’ll probably do a little more poking around myself.
I’m lazy :-P and not interested enough.
However I’ll give you my data-less biased priors :-)
I expect you to find some data. Much of it will be bad because it tends to be produced by Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and these people are not known for their statistical acumen or precision of analysis. Almost all of it will be biased because a study that doesn’t show how bad it is to be a woman in an oppressive patriarchy of male chauvinist pigs is unlikely to be published. Whatever remains (if anything) will show high variance and inconsistency.
If you are interested in the subject I’d like to repeat my suggestion: ask women around you. Real, live women. You don’t have to talk to them about rape—ask them if they are afraid to be on the street alone. afraid to leave the house. afraid to be near male strangers. Listen to what they say.
Do you really believe that the quality of most studies on this topic is so poor that this extremely flawed research strategy you recommend is more likely to be reliable? That seems like an unjustifiably dim view of the relevant research community.
I don’t disagree that asking women you know is one easy way to get evidence on this question, but I would think that even a pretty poorly conducted scientific study would constitute superior evidence.
Yes.
P.S. I do love how directly querying the reality surrounding you is described as an “extremely flawed research strategy” X-D
Well querying it in sample sizes that are much smaller and less random than even the shoddiest academic study is, by comparison, indeed “extremely flawed”.
Well their not systematically biased, unlike the samples that someone with an agenda is likely to use.
I said this below as well, but it’s fairly well buried now so I’ll repeat it here for others’ benefit:
Your hypothesis that any research on fear of rape will be systematically biased towards the claim that the vast majority of women are frequently, distressingly afraid of rape is strongly contraindicated by the fact that the arbitrarily-chosen (i.e., they were open access) research sources I cited at the top of this thread support the opposite conclusion.
(To clarify: I really don’t care very much about this question and as such I’m content to just go along with the rough approximations that a couple of old surveys provided. If someone was actually trying to get a really good answer I would suggest they look further and deeper. Published research would probably be a good start; given what I’ve seen so far, your hypothesis that it’s systematically and hopelessly biased to the point of uselessness is not persuasive)
Um… the particular method you suggested is an extremely flawed research strategy. Especially considering that one of your complaints about the research linked by Vulture was that the sample may not be representative. I don’t know about you, but the women I know well do not constitute a particularly representative sample of women in general.
Describing your experiment as “directly querying the reality surrounding you” makes it sound pretty dandy, but if you actually look at the specifics of the experiment, it’s subject to a host of biases.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!
More than that, a poll about fears is likely to have a pretty high false positive rate—just considering the question is likely to bring up a significant number of instances of anything you fear at all, and if it is phrased as generically as “often” with no definition? Getting at the true numbers would require.. Uhm. No, asking people to monitor their fears would be Nigh-certain to make them much more fearful (“log thoughts of sex” has been tried. The results that came back were blatantly a case of “dont think of a pink elephant” coloring everything) and thus would be deeply unethical. I think the cleanest lift would be a large collection of extensive daily journals, or outright annotated lifelogs. That would probably make your subject pool more introspective than the general population, but it should not skew these specific numbers much. Expensive, however.
It’s interesting that you seem to think that almost every source is likely to be biased… in the exact opposite direction from the results of the two arbitrarily-chosen sources above!