Discredited rape data overshadow what's accurate

Article here. Excerpt:

'A Washington Times headline on Nov. 9 declared, "Pentagon 'gay' rape debacle: Report alleging male-on-male sexual trauma retracted." In an almost unprecedented move, the American Psychological Association (APA) retracted an article it had published a week earlier in its journal, Psychological Services. "Preliminary Data Suggest Rates of Male Sexual Trauma May be Higher than Previously Reported" had claimed that the rate of rape for military males might be 15 times higher than acknowledged. The media trumpeted the presence of another rape crisis.

Why were the data retracted? An APA press release explained, "Although the article went through our standard peer-review process, other scholars have ... raised valid concerns regarding the design and statistical analysis, which compromise the findings." Flawed methodology rendered useless results. This often occurs with rape research, whether it is conducted inside the military, at police stations or on campuses.

The most remarkable aspect of the APA retraction may be that it was mentioned by mainstream media. Most discredited assault studies are invisibly corrected, which allows the original, sensational conclusions to be repeated as fact. For example, the campus survey"Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse" exploded across the airwaves in early 2015. One in three male students would rape, researchers maintained, "if nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences." Activists cried out for tighter controls on campus.

A correction by the study's publisher went virtually unnoticed. It read, "[A]fter publication of the article, Dr. Edwards [the lead researcher] contacted the editorial office to explain that the data presented inadvertently duplicated a dataset that was previously published inProblems of Psychology in the 21st Century. Two similar datasets (the other focusing on rape perceptions and how they differ in individual vs. group judgments) were collected at the same time, but from different individuals."

The conclusions of "Denying Rape" are based on a different set of participants than researchers had surveyed. The massive error invalidates the results. But the publisher claimed, "The error does not affect the results or conclusions." Analyzing an entirely different population than the one surveyed does not "affect the results"?'