AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

The Role of Statistics and Statisticians in Human Rights

Thursday, 17 May 2007

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This seminar, designed with human rights practitioners in mind, outlines some examples of situations in which statisticians were asked to contribute to human rights projects. Our hope is to allow networking between the statistical community and the human rights community so that the unique contributions that statisticians can make towards human rights advocacy will be utilized in the future.

Chair

Ariela Blätter, M.A.
Director, Crisis Preparedness and Response Center
Amnesty International USA
600 Pennsylvania Ave SE
5th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20003
ablatter@aiusa.org

Presentations

A Katrina Experience
David Banks, Ph.D. Professor of the Practice of Statistics 210A Old Chemistry Building Box 90251 Duke University Durham, NC 27708-0251 USA banks@stat.duke.edu	In 2005 the NSF sponsored a number of research projects on the aftermath of Katrina. This talk describes a survey led by Duke, UNC-Charlotte, and Tulane to study the factors that affected whether or not New Orleans residents chose to evacuate in advance of the storm, and what factors affected their post-Katrina experience. As part of this effort we found that some aspects of classic survey methodology do not work well with unsettled populations, and we developed workarounds that often were surprisingly successful.
Guatamala Police Records
Gary Shapiro, M.S. Westat 1650 Research Blvd Rockville MD 20850-3195 garyshapiro@westat.com	Several warehouses were discovered in Guatemala that contain millions of documents belonging to the National Police prior to 1996. The documents are of interest because some provide information on instances of police violence. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech was asked to provide technical assistance for understanding and analyzing the archives. In turn, a group of ASA members provided assistance to Benetech on how sampling of these documents could be done. This talk discusses the complex structure of the archives, the sampling that is now being done, and the type of assistance provided to Benetech.
Darfur- What Could Have Been
Paul L. Zador, Ph.D. Westat 1650 Research Blvd Rockville MD 20850-3195 zadorp1@westat.com	Several estimates of deaths during the Darfur crisis will be summarized. The methods used to derive them, and their reliability, will be reviewed and critiqued based in part on comments recently published in GAO's report on the Darfur crisis. The question will be raised: How do we determine the practical difference having precise disaster estimates of deaths, hunger, injuries, etc. might make? A volunteer group designed a survey of refugee camps in Chad, but the survey was never conducted. We will describe the survey's design, and discuss why it never happened.

Discussant

Erik Voeten, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
and Elliott School of International Affairs
The George Washington University
Old Main 414G
1922 F Street NW
Washington, DC 20052
voeten@gwu.edu

Time

12:30-2:00PM

Location

AAAS Headquarters Auditorium
1200 New York Ave NW
Washington DC 20005

RSVP Online!

Sponsors

Human Rights Section, Washington Statistical Society (WSS)
Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (SHR-AAAS)
Washington-Baltimore Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (DC-AAPOR)
Capitol Area Social Psychologist Association(CASPA)
District of Columbia Sociological Society (DCSS)
District of Columbia Psychological Association (DCPA)

Who Should Attend

Human rights activists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, survey researchers, researchers of unsettled populations, and statisticians.

 

(site updated 03/06/2007)